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The author is grateful for comments from Andrew Gavil, participants at The University of Chicago Law Review’s annual symposium, and workshops at King’s College London and University College London. The author also thanks the staff of The University of Chicago Law Review for their excellent editorial guidance. The views expressed here are the author’s alone. Email: wkovacic@law.gwu.edu. 

I am deeply grateful to Eric Posner, Sanjukta Paul, Brian Callaci, and the participants of the Reassessing the Chicago School of Antitrust Law Symposium for their helpful comments and suggestions.

This Essay was prepared for the symposium organized by The University of Chicago Law Review on Reassessing the Chicago School of Antitrust Law, held on May 10–11, 2019. We thank the participants of the symposium for helpful feedback. Special thanks also to Patrick Todd for illuminating conversations. We are indebted to the over one hundred research assistants at Columbia Law School and The University of Chicago Law School that helped us gather and code the antitrust data we employ in this Essay. Our thanks also to the antitrust enforcers in the 103 agencies that generously provided information for this study. We gratefully acknowledge the funding by the National Science Foundation that supported the early data gathering effort (see NSF-Law & Social Sciences grants 1228453 & 1228483, awarded in September 2012). The coding was subsequently expanded with the generous support of the Columbia Public Policy Grant: “Does Antitrust Policy Promote Market Performance and Competitiveness?,” awarded in June 2015, and additional financial support from Columbia Law School. We also thank the Baker Scholars fund at The University of Chicago Law School for financial support. Except as otherwise noted, all data is available at the Comparative Competition Law Project website, http://comparativecompetitionlaw.org.

I thank Vicki Been for substantial support in designing the study that is the subject of this paper and for insightful comments at all stages of the writing process. For very helpful feedback on prior drafts of this piece, I am grateful to Yun-chien Chang, Russell Engler, Renagh O’Leary, Cristina Rodrigues, Jessica Steinberg, Paul Tremblay, and the participants in the NYU Colloquium on the Law, Economics, and Politics of Urban Affairs, the Harvard Law School Clinical Scholar- ship Workshop, and the Works in Progress Session at the American Association of Law Schools Conference on Clinical Legal Education. I am indebted to Maxwell Austensen, Maria (Mili) Chapado, and Xingzhi Wang for performing the data analyses used in the study. I also thank Rob Collinson and Luis Herskovic for providing additional data sup- port, and Alisa Numansyah for heroically collecting and scanning over one thousand case files across all five boroughs of New York City. Scott Davis, Ethan Fitzgerald, Andrew Gerst, and Alex Wilson provided excellent research assistance. Finally, I thank the Office of Court Administration and the New York City Department of Housing Preserva- tion and Development for providing data used in the study.

For their helpful comments, we thank Christopher Kutz, Meirav Furth-Matzkin, Lee Fennell, Daniel Hemel, Saul Levmore, Barak Medina, Jonathan Masur, Mitchell Polinsky, Yuval Procaccia, Weijia Rao, Re’em Segev, Stephen Sugarman, George Triantis, Eyal Zamir, and participants in the Annual Meeting of the American Law and Economics Association and in faculty workshops at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, the University of Haifa, the University of Southern California, Stanford University, and Tel Aviv University. For superb research assistance, we thank Bar Dor and Niva Orion.

For thoughtful comments and conversations, I thank Greg Ablavsky, Robert Bone, Adam Chilton, Mariano-Florentino Cuellar, David Freeman Engstrom, Richard Epstein, Eric Fish, Nora Freeman Engstrom, Jacob Goldin, Alexandra Lahav, Hiba Hafiz, Deborah Hensler, Daniel E. Ho, David Hoffman, William Hubbard, Samuel Issacharoff, Emma Kaufman, Amalia Kessler, Dan Klerman, Jonathan Masur, Michael McConnell, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, Saul Levmore, Jim Pfander, Bill Rubenstein, Joanna Schwartz, Catherine M. Sharkey, Shirin Sinnar, Norm Spaulding, Alan Trammell, Adam Zimmerman, and the editors of The University of Chicago Law Review. I also thank participants at the Annual Civil Procedure Workshop and the Clifford Symposium.

For their feedback, I thank Professors Ian Ayres, Rishi Batra, Glenn Cohen, Noam Ebner, Deborah Eisenberg, John Goldberg, David Hoffman, Louis Kaplow, Andy Kaufman, Andrew Mamo, John Manning, Martha Minow, Bob Mnookin, Scott Peppet, Jeff Seul, Jean Sternlight, Andrea Schneider, Guhan Subramanian, Cass Sunstein, and Rachel Viscomi. I benefited enormously from feedback at faculty colloquia at Harvard, Maryland, and UNLV. And I thank my research assistants Haley Banks, Christopher Dotson, Juhi Gupta, Ayoung Kim, Ben Pincus, Jordan Shapiro, Austin Smith, and Elise Williard, without whose careful work this research would have been impossible.