Today’s links Why they’re smearing Lina Khan: She wants you to have nice things and they don’t (it’s really that simple). Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2003, 2008 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading Why they’re smearing Lina Khan (permalink) My god, they sure hate Lina Khan. This once-in-a-generation, groundbreaking, brilliant legal scholar and fighter for the public interest, the slayer of Reaganomics, has attracted more vitriol, mockery, and dismissal than any of her predecessors in living memory. She sure must be doing something right, huh? A quick refresher. In 2017, Khan – then a law student – published Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox in the Yale Law Journal. It was a brilliant, blistering analysis showing how the Reagan-era theory of antitrust (which celebrates monopolies as “efficient”) had failed on its own terms, using Amazon as Exhibit A of the ways in which post-Reagan antitrust had left Americans vulnerable to corporate abuse: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox The paper sent seismic shocks through both legal and economic circles, and goosed the neo-Brandeisian movement (sneeringly dismissed as “hipster antitrust”). This movement is a rebuke to Reaganomics, with its celebration of monopolies, trickle-down, offshoring, corporate dark money, revolving-door regulatory capture, and companies that are simultaneously too big to fail and too big to jail. This movement has many proponents, of course – not just Khan – but Khan’s careful scholarship, combined with her encyclopedic knowledge of the long-dormant statutory powers that federal agencies had to make change, and…Pluralistic: Why they're smearing Lina Khan (14 July 2023)