Author: Ron Davis

Heather Cox Richardson offers a wide variety of indications that Trump is, as they used to say in China, rapidly losing the Mandate of Heaven.

I think her presentation will very much repay the viewing. Among her topics are one or two that I actually know something about. Chief among these is antitrust, where her discussion begins about 4 ½ minutes into the video. 

IMHO, Dr. Richardson’s nostalgia for the pre-Reagainism/Neoliberalism is slightly too enthusiastic. It’s true, as she says, that by the 1960s there was precedent for considering the legitimate interests of many corporate “stakeholders”—shareholders, customers, suppliers, vendors, and workers—when evaluating mergers under the Clayton Act. But any legal rule that instructs a judge to throw a lot of disparate factors into a pot, stir them around, and see what emerges, tends to produce results that are hard to predict, that may be especially susceptible to the judge’s political bias, and that may lack intellectual consistency. 

Richardson goes on to express optimism about a new antitrust institute being formed at Columbia Law School by the brilliant but controversial Lina Khan, former Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, to rethink the foundations of antitrust law. I wish them well. And I am glad to hear that “there are some smart lawyers at Columbia Law,” or words to that effect.