[event] Jonathan Barnett: When Antitrust Gets It Wrong

Speaker: Jonathan Barnett is director of the law school’s Media, Entertainment and Technology Law Program and the author of The Big Steal: Ideology, Interest, and the Undoing of Intellectual Property (Oxford University Press 2024) and Innovators, Firms, and Markets: The Organizational Logic of Intellectual Property (Oxford University Press 2021).. Barnett specializes in antitrust, intellectual property, and corporate and business law, with a focus on innovation policy and strategy in technology markets. Barnett has published in the Harvard Law Review, Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, Yale Law Journal, Journal of Legal Studies, Jurimetrics, Review of Law & Economics, and other scholarly journals. He also regularly comments in the press and at conferences on legal and policy issues concerning antitrust and intellectual property. He joined USC in 2006 and was a visiting professor at NYU School of Law in 2010. He is also an academic affiliate of the International Center for Law & Economics. Prior to academia, Barnett practiced corporate law as a senior associate at Cleary Gottlieb LLP in New York, specializing in private equity and mergers and acquisitions transactions. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Barnett received a MPhil from Cambridge University and a JD from Yale Law School.

Description: Patent holdup. Killer acquisitions. Kill zones. Default bias. Four influential theories of harm, and four cases where weak evidence drove major policy interventions. This talk offers a critical assessment of the new competition orthodoxy.

Organizer: Thibault Schrepel, Associate Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (ALTI).

Format: Jonathan Barnett will give a 30-minute talk, followed by a discussion moderated by Dr. Thibault Schrepel and a Q&A with the audience.