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Adversarial Economics in Antitrust Litigation: Losing Academic Consensus in The Battle of The Experts

dc.contributor.authorAllensworth, Rebecca Haw
dc.date.accessioned2013-10-28T23:06:09Z
dc.date.available2013-10-28T23:06:09Z
dc.date.issued2012
dc.identifier.citation106 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1261 (2012)en_US
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1803/5602
dc.description.abstractThe adversarial presentation of expert scientific evidence tends to obscure academic consensus. In the context of litigation, small, marginal disagreements can be made to seem important and settled issues can be made to appear hopelessly deadlocked. This Article explores this dynamic's effect on antitrust litigation. Modem antitrust law is steeped in microeconomics, and suits rely heavily on economic expert witnesses. Indeed, expert testimony is often the "whole game" in an antitrust dispute because experts testify about dispositive issues such as the competitive effect of a business practice or the relevant boundaries of a market. And the Supreme Court has encouraged-even engineered-this delegation to economic authority. But when antitrust judges are faced with the appearance of deadlock among economic experts, they are forced to either decide the substance of the economics themselves or ask the jury to resolve it as a matter of fact. Both practices void much of the benefit of courtroom expertise. This Article examines several reforms that would make expert testimony less adversarial and evaluates their ability to better reveal the true distribution of expert opinion on an economic question. It then presents two reforms that, while preserving the adversarial structure of expert evidence, would increase the likelihood that consensus economic views prevail at trial.en_US
dc.format.extent1 document (47 pages)en_US
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdf
dc.language.isoen_USen_US
dc.publisherNorthwestern University Law Reviewen_US
dc.subject.lcshEvidence, Expert -- United Statesen_US
dc.subject.lcshAntitrust law -- United Statesen_US
dc.subject.lcshAdversary system (Law) -- United Statesen_US
dc.titleAdversarial Economics in Antitrust Litigation: Losing Academic Consensus in The Battle of The Expertsen_US
dc.typeArticleen_US
dc.identifier.ssrn-urihttp://ssrn.com/abstract=1852832


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