I would not jump at front-loading all of the economics because it highlights the greatest weakness of most of your students. We can learn the law and apply economic policies naturally, but theoretical economics is hard. The better approach is to start each unit (Section 7, Section 1, Section 2) with an overview of the general economic concepts that are most often applied there. So it’s like 3 mini lectures on econ as you go along. This is the way I did my outline prior to the exam – although I didn’t have to take the exam because I audited the course!

One last topic – joint ventures are so common in today’s global economy but they are extremely difficult to understand in the context of antitrust law, because they resemble both single firm and multi-firm conduct. I would spend more time in this area towards the end of the semester.

Regards – and what are you doing at UT?

Great suggestion Andy. Currently, I try to include some oligopoly theory in the economics primer, but only a bit. We do revisit when we hit coordinated effects mergers, but a detour to the collusion material there makes sense.

Thanks for the welcome feedback on the second edition of the casebook!

I like your idea of moving from an economic overview to mergers. One advantage is that because merger analysis today is so very concept-focused, the approach will more quickly focus students on contemporary antitrust analysis — on asking the right economic questions. It poses less of a risk that the older, categorization-oriented material will confuse and confound them. Much of modern antitrust analysis can be taught through mergers, especially using the Guidelines and the newer lower court cases.

Here’s one suggestion. If you do that, you might want to detour at coordinated effects back to the material in Chapter 3 on collusion, especially the front material that explores the economics of collusion. Because you will not have covered this given your acceleration of mergers, the students will not have a complete background in oligopoly theory. Integrating the Chapter 3 material at that point in Chapter 5 might help to cement the students’ understanding of the relationship between coordinated effects and collusion.

Hope that helps.

Best,
Andy

However, the question is to what extent. “two 705 minute lectures” seems too long. Well, I don’t know what concepts or how broad you are going to cover in those lectures. To me, 705 minutes of lectures as an introduction is scaring.

But I DO like your innovation of going directly to a merger case first. This is really a good idea. Students will definitely have an impressive taste on many important economic concepts as you mentioned and the fundamental philosophy of antitrust law. And everyone will have something to say on merger cases. (It is much more intuitive than the vertical restraints cases.)