Angela Tse

Oscar Rodas-Falla has joined AAI as a Summer 2023 Intern. Oscar is an inaugural recipient of the ABA Antitrust Division’s 2023 Law Student Diversity Stipend. “We are thrilled to welcome Oscar to AAI as our summer intern. As an organization dedicated to promoting competition and fostering diversity in the antitrust community, we are pleased to have Oscar on board,” said AAI President Diana Moss. “His work will support AAI’s critical leadership in promoting strong antitrust enforcement and competition policy. We look forward to a productive and enriching summer together.”

As an AAI Summer Intern, Oscar hopes to advance AAI’s pro-enforcement mission and engage with complex issues in the antitrust world to defend the values of fair competition and consumer welfare.

The recipients of the 21st Annual Jerry S. Cohen Award for Antitrust Scholarship were announced today by Cohen Milstein. Each year, AAI hosts the presentation of this award at the Annual Policy Conference luncheon. The award is administered by the law firm he founded, Cohen Milstein. The award was created through a trust established in honor of the late Jerry S. Cohen, an outstanding trial lawyer and antitrust writer and given each year to the best antitrust writing during the prior year that is consistent with the following standards established by the Board of Trustees of the Jerry S. Cohen Memorial Fund.

Erik Hovenkamp was selected for his article, “The Antitrust Duty to Deal in the Age of Big Tech,” 131 Yale L.J. 1483 (2022). The article argues that the law on exclusive dealing has failed to distinguish between “primary” and “secondary” refusals to deal, and that the suffocating evidentiary requirements imposed on refusal to deal claims should not be applied to secondary refusals to deal because they do not implicate the same innovation concerns that motivate suspicion of “primary” refusal to deal claims. Instead, the author argues that secondary refusal to deal claims should be evaluated analogously to tying or related vertical restraints.

Gopal Das Varma and Martino De Stefano were selected for their article, “Entry Deterrence, Concentration, and Merger Policy,” 61 Rev. of Indus. Org. 199 (2022). The authors criticize current merger enforcement for weighing post-merger entry as a factor potentially mitigating the otherwise anticompetitive effects of a merger without also considering how the merger could increase incentives by incumbents to engage in conduct calculated to deter future entry. They construct a game-theoretic model which demonstrates that a merger can reduce the likelihood of entry even at elevated profit levels by increasing incumbent incentives to invest in entry deterrence.

The three winning authors will share a $12,400 prize and will each receive an inscribed original artwork created by Lori Milstein.

In addition, this year’s award selection committee conferred six category awards, as follows:

• Best Antitrust Article of 2022 on Burdens of Proof: Robin C. Feldman and Mark A. Lemley for “Atomistic Antitrust,” 63 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1869 (2022)
• Best Antitrust Article of 2022 on Platforms: John B. Kirkwood for “Tech Giant Exclusion,” 74 Fla. L. Rev. 63 (2022).
• Best Antitrust Article of 2022 on Common Ownership: D. Daniel Sokol for “Debt, Control, and Collusion,” 71 Emory L.J. 695 (2022).
• Best Antitrust Article of 2022 on Vertical Mergers: Simon Loertscher and Leslie M. Marx for “Double Markups, Information, and Vertical Mergers,” 67 The Antitrust Bull. 434 (2022).
• Best Antitrust Article of 2022 on Horizontal Mergers: Volker Nocke and Michael D.  Whinston for “Concentration Thresholds for Horizontal Mergers,” 112 Amer. Econ. Rev. 1915 (2022).
• Best Antitrust Article of 2022 on Collusion in Auctions: Sylvain Chassang, Kei Kawai, Jun Nakabayashi and Juan Ortner for “Robust Screens for Non-Competitive Bidding in Procurement Auctions,” 90 Econometrica 315 (2022).

This year’s award selection committee consisted of Zachary Caplan, Trial Attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust Division; Warren Grimes, Professor of Law at Southwestern Law School; John Kirkwood, Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law; Roger Noll, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Stanford University; Leslie Marx, Professor of Economics at Duke Fuqua School of Business, Robert Lande, Professor of Law at University of Baltimore School of Law; Daniel A. Small, Of Counsel at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, and Daniel H. Silverman, Partner at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC. (Professor Marx and Professor Kirkwood recused themselves from deliberations relating to their own articles.)

On April 19, 2023, AAI announced three new members to the AAI Advisory Board. Melissa Maxman is Managing Partner of Cohen & Gresser’s Washington, DC office. Evan Starr is Associate Professor of Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland. Judith Zahid is Co-chair of the Antitrust group at Zelle, LLP and Managing Partner of the Oakland office.

“We are delighted that Melissa, Evan, and Judith have joined the AAI Advisory Board,” said AAI President, Diana Moss. “They bring valuable experience and insight to AAI’s Advisory Board braintrust, including in areas of labor economics, private antitrust litigation, and international issues,” she added. AAI’s volunteer Advisory Board consists of outstanding experts in the fields of antitrust and consumer protection law, economics, and business in the United States and abroad.

Melissa H. Maxman is the Managing Partner of Cohen & Gresser’s Washington, D.C. office. She has decades of litigation experience at both the trial and appellate levels, primarily in the areas of antitrust, RICO, environmental law, complex commercial disputes, and white collar defense. She has extensive experience advising domestic and foreign corporations on global antitrust issues. She has represented clients in complex civil and criminal matters before the Federal Trade Commission, the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, and in private civil matters. Melissa has been recognized in The Legal 500’s U.S. guide in the commercial litigation, corporate investigations, white collar defense, general commercial disputes, and antitrust categories, where she is described as a “brilliant thinker and lawyer” with a “deep knowledge in antitrust” who is “a passionate defender of her clients in litigation.” She has also been recognized by Chambers USA in the antitrust litigation specialists category, in which she was described as “strong knowledgeable counsel with strong litigation, policy, and legislative skills and experience.” She has also been named one of Washington, D.C.’s Super Lawyers each year since 2011. Melissa has also been recognized by Lawdragon as one of 2022’s 500 Leading Litigators in America.

Evan Starr is an Associate Professor of Management & Organization at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. He received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan and a bachelor’s degree from Denison University. He originally hails from Claremont, California. Starr’s current research examines issues at the intersection of human capital accumulation, employee mobility, entrepreneurship, and innovation. In a recent set of projects utilizing employee-employer matched data and survey data that he and coauthors developed, Starr examined the use and impacts of noncompete agreements and their enforceability on the provision of firm-sponsored training, employee mobility and earnings, and on the creation, growth, and survival of new ventures.

Judith Zahid is Managing Partner of the Oakland office and co-chair of the Firm’s Antitrust group. Judith’s practice is focused on assessing complex antitrust claims and pursuing recoveries on behalf of individual corporate clients in many different industries, with a growing expertise in the pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors. She has represented plaintiffs in numerous high-stakes price-fixing and monopolization cases, with recoveries from those cases totaling well over $2 billion. While Judith is involved in all aspects of the cases she litigates, she places particular emphasis on her work with industry and damages experts.