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Precedents lay down rules in their rationes, and such rules are binding in later cases whose facts fall within the scope of those rules.

That is, precedents lay down rules (rationes) in their judgments—just as statutes lay down rules in their provisions—and such rules are binding in later cases whose facts fall within the scope of those rules. Statutes and precedents simply employ a different process for laying down rules.

Hence, the Court has made explicit that stare decisis is a flexible doctrine; it is not “inexorable command.”203

But even when the Court is not overruling its precedent and purports to be following precedent faithfully, stare decisis is a very flexible tool to shape the law. This is because of the tool of “precedent vitality.” Supreme Court opinions vary in their vitality. Hanford and Spriggs write, “[s]ome precedents are more legally authoritative than others and thus have an enhanced ability to justify and legitimize the justices’ policy choices.”204 But it is not the age of the precedent that determines its vitality or even particularly the factors mentioned by the Court in Planned Parenthood for overruling a case.205 Rather, Hanford and Spriggs argue that “the vitality of precedent . . . derive[s] from the Supreme Court’s interpretation of it in other cases.”206 Hence, while appearing to apply its precedent faithfully, the Supreme Court can enhance or decrease the vitality of its precedent in various ways. The Court may apply the rationale of one of its opinions to new facts; it may expand the rationale of one of its opinions; or it may distinguish its precedent or limit it to its particular facts or even ignore a particular case altogether. By these methods, “the decision to interpret precedent is driven by the desire to influence the scope and meaning of existing precedent and the goal of legitimizing new legal policy.”207

We know that mergers and acquisitions are challenging for the companies involved. But we spend less time thinking about the challenge they pose for antitrust authorities. This regulator has to decide whether to approve a merger based on its predicted outcome for the businesses and society as a whole. Generally, if consumers are likely to be harmed, authorities prefer to block the merger. If not, it gets the nod. Sometimes, approval is granted on certain conditions.

It’s mind-bogglingly tricky, though, to predict a merger’s effects. Regulators try to model how prices, sales, and even the combining parties’ research and development efforts will change after a merger. On the one hand, M&As can help companies use their resources more efficiently. That can benefit consumers through lower prices, more innovation, and better products. On the other hand, M&As can also strengthen the market power of the combined entity, reducing competition in a way that harms consumers. That’s why antitrust authorities bear an awesome responsibility. This is especially true in pharmaceutical markets where new and affordable drugs can improve and even save the lives of many people.

Merger activity is rising, and 2021 saw a record-setting year in global M&A activity. The economic literature produces mixed predictions on how mergers and acquisitions shape the returns and the incentives to innovation. On the one hand, mergers can encourage firms to innovate more, as less competition allows them to capture a higher share of innovation returns. On the other hand, less competition means that firms have fewer incentives to innovate to defend their market positions. In new research on how a relaxation of pre-merger notification rules corresponded to changes in patent activity, I find that mergers no longer deterred by antitrust authorities lead to lower innovation overall. This effect is particularly pronounced among horizontal mergers, i.e. mergers between firms that occupy the same product market. Non-horizontal mergers that take advantage of synergies are more likely to boost innovation.

Deterred mergers are those that the firms do not even attempt because they know that antitrust authorities will block them. However, not all mergers are subject to antitrust scrutiny. In the US, like in many other countries, a pre-merger notification to the authorities is required only for larger mergers. As such, only mergers that need to notify the antitrust authorities can be deterred.

“Innovation is like a manna from heaven,” over which policymakers have little control, according to Robert Solow’s model. Despite this, if we look at the computer industry, antitrust seems to have achieved some important results. In this article, I will briefly review how antitrust enforcement against AT&T, IBM, Microsoft and Intel spurred innovation in the computer hardware and software industries.

AT&T, probably the most famous case in United States antitrust history, is well-known for the decision in 1982 that required the telecommunication monopoly to break up into several companies. However, the AT&T antitrust story is much more complex and fascinating with clear fundamental effects on the computer economy we live in today. Historically, AT&T owned Bell Labs—also called the “idea factory”— which was the birthplace of several Nobel Prize-winning inventions. Probably the most famous invention at Bell Labs was the 1947 invention of the transistor, for which Bell Labs scientists William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956. The transistor represents the beginning of the digital age and is present in all our modern digital devices.

Venture capital (VC) and startups backed by VCs are important contributors to the economy. According to Gornall and Strebulaev (2021), around half of the U.S. public firms founded within the past fifty years were financed by a VC fund in their early stage, accounting for 41% of the total market capitalization. Moreover, the macroeconomic impact of VC investments is much greater than that indicated by market valuations since the profound contribution of innovations generated by VC-backed startups is not fully reflected in the valuations (Opp, 2019). However, these startups are vulnerable to the anticompetitive conduct of incumbents (e.g., killer acquisition (Cunningham, Ederer, and Ma, 2021), predatory or exclusionary acts, etc.). To promote competition in the product market and foster innovation, antitrust laws intend to protect startups from being abused and deterred by the monopoly power of incumbents. Recently, these protections are becoming more intense. In December 2022, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision for harming the competition in gaming consoles and subscription services. Shortly thereafter, in January 2023, DOJ antitrust division filed its second antitrust lawsuit against Google in just over two years, seeking to break up Google’s online advertising business. These major antitrust cases brought against tech giants have caused debates among VCs on whether more intense antitrust enforcement could hurt the startups they are meant to protect 1 . Some VCs express the concern that intense antitrust enforcement will deter the incumbents from acquiring the startups and thus stifle an important pathway for VC exit. Other VCs suggest that adequate enforcement on anticompetitive practices can level the playing field. Therefore, it’s worth investigating how antitrust enforcement affects VCs’ investment decisions and VC-backed startups.

Antitrust laws in the U.S. play a crucial role in promoting competition and innovation by prohibiting anticompetitive mergers and business practices. Specifically, the antitrust laws regulate the three main aspects: cartels and anticompetitive agreements (Sherman Act, Section 1), anticompetitive business practices (e.g., exclusionary acts, predatory acts, etc.) used by dominant firms (Sherman Act, Section 2), and mergers that may significantly reduce competition (Clayton Act). While the antitrust laws undoubtedly restrain the market power of incumbents, their effects on new entrants and the VCs investing in these startups are mixed. On the one hand, antitrust enforcement protects the new entrants from being abused by the anticompetitive practices of incumbents (Sherman Act, Section 2) and thus increases startups’ chance of survival. In this case, antitrust enforcement motivates the VCs to invest more in startups. On the other hand, intense antitrust enforcement may refrain VCs from investing in new entrants and thus harm the development of startups for the following three reasons. First, increasing antitrust enforcement on mergers (Clayton Act) deters the incumbents from acquiring new entrants, reducing the chance of a successful VC exit. Second, under intense enforcement (Sherman Act, Section 1), firms are less likely to form cartels that collude to raise product prices, leading to more vigorous competition, lower prices, and fewer profits for both incumbents and new entrants. Startups’ poor performance in the product market makes VCs reluctant to continue investing in these companies. Third, strict enforcement on monopolization (Sherman Act, Section 2) makes the startups less likely to take advantage of their market power even after surviving the competition and gaining significant market share, leading to fewer investments by VCs.

Green antitrust appears very sympathetic: a fast transition to more sustainable production and consumption is essential to the future of our planet, and corporations must certainly take their responsibility for it. Where government coordination fails to nudge the balance from grey to green equilibria – because of lack of information, legal options, political will, or otherwise – perhaps private coordination can come to the rescue. After all, polluting companies will typically know best how to reduce their own externalities. And indeed, green CEOs increasingly stand up for good causes. For some time now, passionate competition law scholars have been hammering home the importance of sustainability.15 But is contributing to the fight against climate change truly a nail in this case? Or is it rather a screw? Deciding this first is essential when selecting the right tool to use to fix the problem – all the more so when it is urgent. The central question here, therefore, is whether it can be expected that undertakings will take more corporate social responsibility when they compete less. The key premise of the green antitrust movement is that tensions between competition and sustainability can be eased with less competition. But is that premise true?

In this paper we review the available economic literature to find that it provides little to no ground for believing that restrictions of competition would incentivize companies to take more sustainability initiatives. On the contrary, it appears that competition induces companies to produce more sustainably, also if they are in part intrinsically motivated to so do. Even if first-mover disadvantage, a concept to which the proponents of green antitrust policy point, would lead to a deadlock preventing more sustainable production, sustainability agreements create no incentive to break that impasse. The rare genuine sustainability agreement cannot justify relaxing general competition rules. It seems proper, therefore, to regard the corporate cheers for green antitrust policy with some skepticism and suspicion. That is also the attitude that we should expect our competition agencies to have. After all, they are tasked first and foremost with the protection of competition.

Presently large digital companies, known as Big Tech, are in the crosshairs of regulators and Congress for alleged monopolistic conduct. Antitrust lawsuits, and government and legislative interventions worldwide against Big Tech, are hard to count. Keeping track of their developments has become challenging. A recent study published in this journal identified “100-plus antitrust cases” only considering Google in 23 jurisdictions.

The U.S. has often been criticized for being lax compared to EU antitrust enforcers in dealing with Big Tech’s power. But innovation does not seem to be a hallmark of EU companies. In the U.S., Alexander Bell invented and patented the telephone before founding what was later called AT&T. It was at AT&T that other game-changer technologies, such as the transistor and Unix operating system, were also invented. IBM, Microsoft, Google are only three other examples of U.S. tech companies which changed the computer industry forever by setting the tone for the present digital economy. This raises the question of whether U.S. antitrust enforcement action played a prominent role in the innovation process which led to breakthrough technologies flourishing especially in the computer industry. It also begs the question “why do we see less innovation on the other side of the Atlantic?”

That the recent decisions by the conservative majority court may not be in tune with average Americans is backed up by recent polling and surveys. But those rulings also signal a newly unapologetic and muscular court, willing to buck the national mood.

"They're using their conservatism in a powerful way and they're acting like they're in a hurry," said Stephen Wermiel, a constitutional law professor at American University Washington College of Law.

Like Adams, George Washington - the first President of the United States - embraced the notion of a government of laws. In September 1789, not long after the U.S. Constitution's ratification, 147Washington wrote a telling letter to Pennsylvania's legislature. 148"It should be the highest ambition of every American," he wrote, "to extend his views beyond himself, and to bear in mind that his conduct will not only affect himself, his country, and his immediate posterity; but that its influence may be co-extensive with the world, and stamp political happiness or misery on ages yet unborn." To obtain that end, "to establish the government of laws," he observed, "the union of these States is absolutely necessary." As Washington's letter emphasized:

In every proceeding, this great, this important object should ever be kept in view; and so long as our measures tend to this; and are marked with the wisdom of a well informed and enlightened people, we may reasonably hope, under the smiles of Heaven, to convince the world that the happiness of nations can be accomplished by pacific revolutions in their political systems, without the destructive intervention of the sword. 149

The legal landscape surrounding the utilization of DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) in India remains uncertain, as there exists no dedicated legislation or regulatory framework governing their operations within the country. Nonetheless, several general legal principles and existing regulations may have implications for DAOs.

Primarily, the tokens issued by DAO's could potentially come under the oversight of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI). Though, as on date there is legislation to classify putting the tokens within the ambit of SEBI however, it cannot be ruled out that the SEBI has power to carry out an investigation and take call on the same.

Current legal precedent teaches that the U.S. IP system is geared toward human participation —read “natural persons.” Machines need not apply. As the Copyright Office Compendium explains, “The copyright law only protects ‘the fruits of intellectual labor’ that ‘are founded in the creative powers of the mind,’” citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1879 Trade-Mark Cases. However, the issues of inventorship, ownership, and assignment are too often conflated. A corporation may have employees who are the true inventors, but they may have an obligation to assign the resulting patent instrument to the organization. The legal inquiry at the heart of this issue is whether a DAO may be the digital tree that provides “the fruits of intellectual labor.”

A distinguishing feature of DAOs is that as a collective, it represents a group of human individuals (“the organs”), often the token holders. The existence of natural persons in such a collective has the potential to allow them to escape the legal pitfalls that befall machines and monkeys when attempting to generate IP. As discussed above, the Patent and Copyright Act rely on traditional doctrines of creative activity by “natural persons” for conception, authorship, and other “ministerial” acts (e.g., 35 U.S.C. § 115 lists the requirements for any individual to submit an “inventor’s oath or declaration.”)

Intellectual property is critical to the sustained growth of the economy.

Earlier this year, a report by the National Security Commission for Artificial Intelligence reported that China is “fill[ing] the void” left by weakened U.S. intellectual property and unreliable I.P. rights in A.I. and other strategic technologies. They write that the U.S. “lacks the comprehensive I.P. policies it needs for the A.I. era and is hindered by legal uncertainties in current U.S. patent eligibility and patentability doctrine.” The report says that the U.S. must look at I.P. as a national security priority.

Reports like this should raise alarm bells throughout the nation’s capital. Fortunately, some in Washington are listening. The Republican Study Committee in the U.S. House has introduced the Countering Communist China Act. Mainly geared to address China’s aggressive push for the global innovative lead in critical emerging technologies, this legislation includes critical provisions that would strengthen our patent system.

It’s official: America is no longer a “shining city upon a hill.”

Data released Thursday from Pew Research shows that our allies are beyond delighted that the Trump presidency has ended. Confidence in U.S. leadership has soared. Our friends are breathing a sigh of relief.

The value of democracy has been taken for granted until recently, but this assumption seems to be under threat now more than ever before. As was explained in Chapter 1, democracy’s claim to be valuable does not rest on just one particular merit, and scholars tend to distinguish three different types of values (Sen 1999). This book focused on the instrumental value of democracy (and hence not on the intrinsic and constructive value), and investigated the value of democracy for peace (Chapters 3 and 4), control of corruption (Chapter 5) and economic development (Chapter 6). This study was based on a search of an enormous academic database for certain keywords,6 then pruned the thousands of articles down to a few hundred articles (see Appendix) which statistically analysed the connection between the democracy and the four expected outcomes. The frst fiding is that a reverse wave away from democracy has not happened (see Chapter 2). Not yet, at least. Democracy is not doing worse than before, at least not in comparative perspective. While it is true that there is a dramatic decline in democracy in some countries,7 a general trend downwards cannot yet be detected. It would be better to talk about ‘stagnation’, as not many dictatorships have democratized recently, while democracies have not yet collapsed. Another fnding is that the instrumental value of democracy is very questionable. The feld has been deeply polarized between researchers who endorse a link between democracy and positive outcomes, and those who reject this optimistic idea and instead emphasize the negative effects of democracy. There has been ‘no consensus’ in the quantitative literature on whether democracy has instrumental value which leads some beneficial general outcomes. Some scholars claim there is a consensus, but they only do so by ignoring a huge amount of literature which rejects their own point of view. After undertaking a large-scale analysis of carefully selected articles published on the topic (see Appendix), this book can conclude that the connections between democracy and expected benefts are not as strong as they seem. Hence, we should not overstate the links between the phenomena. The overall evidence is weak. Take the expected impact of democracy on peace for example. As Chapter 3 showed, the study of democracy and interstate war has been a fourishing theme in political science, particularly since the 1970s. However, there are four reasons why democracy does not cause peace between countries, and why the empirical support for the popular idea of democratic peace is quite weak. Most statistical studies have not found a strong correlation between democracy and interstate war at the dyadic level. They show that there are other—more powerful—explanations for war and peace, and even that the impact of democracy is a spurious one (caveat 1). Moreover, the theoretical foundation of the democratic peace hypothesis is weak, and the causal mechanisms are unclear (caveat 2). In addition, democracies are not necessarily more peaceful in general, and the evidence for the democratic peace hypothesis at the monadic level is inconclusive

Globally, we find that support for populism has collapsed during the 2020-21 coronavirus pandemic. This includes support for populist parties, agreement with populist attitudes, and the approval ratings of individual populist leaders.

On average, populist leaders saw a 10 percentage point drop in their approval ratings from the second quarter of 2020 to the final quarter of this year. Meanwhile, support for key populist attitudes – such as belief in the “will of the people” or that society is divided between ordinary people and a “corrupt elite” – has declined in almost every country.

There is a pessimistic tradition of technological determinism for society, going back to the easy lives of the Eloi in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, which are contrasted with those of the dark, subterranean, post-proletarian Morlocks. AI and the Internet serve the academic and professional groups who invented and developed them very well, but it is not yet clear that they yet serve the majority of the population as well, beyond cheap holidays and pornography.

Many prognosticators claim that up to half of all current jobs will be automated by AI within a few decades, not just those of truck drivers but also doctors and journalists: the labour component in car production has fallen from 70 per cent to 48 per cent in a decade. But what new jobs will be created, and can all those displaced become state employees with titles like ‘compliance officer’? A World Economic Forum report suggests that twice as many jobs will be created as are destroyed, and a glance at standard UN figures shows that the countries with the highest level of robot installations also have the lowest unemployment. So, there is much evidence to be found on the optimistic side, as is the simple historical fact that all previous phases of automation have been followed by masses of new jobs: in 1830 the majority of the British population worked in agriculture, though now it is a mere couple of percent. Our ancestors could not have imagined the non-agricultural future most of us enjoy, free of harvests and backbreaking work. There also seems to be a general understanding that if profits continue to accrue mostly to the owners of AI capital – machines and software – much of that will have to be recycled to the rest of the population, employed or not, if developed societies are to remain stable. The Universal Basic Income is one suggestion for doing that. On the other hand, total hours worked have fallen in developed societies, and the alternative possibility that the non-working population will continue to grow cannot be ruled out.

In popular culture, the fear of AI taking over jobs often manifests in dystopian narratives in which machines replace human workers, leading to societal unrest and economic collapse. Films like "The Terminator" and "Blade Runner" depict a future where AI-driven automation results in widespread unemployment and social upheaval, reflecting deep-seated anxieties about technological advancement and its impact on the workforce. These portrayals resonate with real-world concerns about job displacement and the growing role of AI in various industries.

A new study set out to address the significance – and speed – with which AI might automate tasks currently performed by workers. Titled ”Which Tasks are Cost-Effective to Automate With Computer Vision,” the study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT Sloan School of Management, The Productivity Institute, and IBM’s Institute for Business Value challenges conventional wisdom surrounding AI's potential impact on the economy, particularly focusing on the domain of computer vision.

Automation and automation robotics do harness software and technology to serve the public in various fashions. While it is not completely ubiquitous, the adoption of such technology is seen by many to be inevitable, propelled forward by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Although COVID-19 was in many ways a regression, automation began to shine like a silver lining in a world where so much was disrupted. From producers and manufacturers attempting to restore supply chains and companies looking to replace and advance their workforce, automation stepped up to the plate, making both a possibility.