Spring Meeting Thoughts
The ABA Section of Antitrust Law held its Spring Meeting last week. The meeting attracts several thousand antitrust lawyers and economists and features numerous panel discussions of various antitrust and consumer protection issues. There is also, of course, a lot of socializing and networking (including the initial Antitrust Review blogger meetup). Below are reports on the Spring Meeting from other bloggers and the mainstream press followed by my thoughts.
Rebecca Tushnet at the 43(b)log has a lengthy and detailed post on the “Developments in Deception: The Evolution of the Deception Doctrine in False Advertising Law Through Recent Cases and Enforcement Actions” panel. And she has another pair of lengthy and detailed posts (one, two) on the “Ears to the Ground: Legal Fallout from Product Promotion and Disparagement by Consumers” panel.
The popular press reported that FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras was “defiant over the agency’s policy of pursuing enforcement action against pharmaceutical companies making payments to generic drug makers to stay out of particular markets” and the comments of David L. Meyer, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s antitrust division, that – in his opinion – “so-called reverse payments should be considered illegal.”
I was not able to make as many panels this year as I would have liked. Nonetheless, as always, the panelists I had the pleasure of hearing were extremely knowledgeable about their subjects and possessed excellent CVs. Nonetheless, the flaws that we identified last year, particularly the near-unanimity of the panelists, remain. I did a quick tally of the Wednesday panelists (which I assume is, more or less, a representative sample). Of the 90 panelists (two of whom were on two panels), 2 were judges; 4 were full-time professors (i.e., did not also work at a law firm); 24 worked for the government (17 for DOJ/FTC; 1 for the SEC; 1 for the FBI; 2 from state AG’s offices; 1 from the EC; and 2 from Canada); 52 were defense oriented (defense-oriented law firms, in-house corporate counsel and consulting firms). Of the remaining 8 panelists, 1 worked for the Electronic Freedom Foundation, 4 worked for plaintiffs firms, and 3 worked for firms that represent both plaintiffs and defendants. While this classification is not precise, it does illustrate the lack of viewpoints from the plaintiffs bar and academics out of the mainstream (to paraphrase Hanno).
What did you think about the Spring Meeting? Leave your thoughts in the comments below or drop us an email.
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