Danny Sokol, a former student of mine now teaching antitrust
at Wisconsin, has arranged a series of posts on his Antitrust &
Competition Policy blog addressing how different professors approach
teaching antitrust. Here is what I said.
This year, I am teaching three classes—Antitrust, Network
Industries and Copyright—and one seminar, Antitrust and IP Policy. I think of
Antitrust and Network Industries as a nice, somewhat integrated two-quarter—we
do quarters at Chicago—sequence: Antitrust, a class on the regulation of
artificial monopoly, and Network Industries, a class on the regulation of
natural monopoly. (We also have a separate Telecommunications Law class and
there is some overlap between that class and Network Industries.) The name of
the seminar really should be Whatever Randy Wants to Read Right Now; last year,
it was classics in the secondary copyright literature; this year it is recently
published articles or draft articles on antitrust.
The Antitrust class is by far the largest of the courses,
taught in our large auditorium-style classroom. (That was 115 students this
year.) I think that the course is a pretty conventional if economically-driven
antitrust course. I don’t use a casebook and instead use an edited set of
materials (here and
here). That gives
me great flexibility, so I can easily make last-minute changes, but is also
obviously something of a burden to update the materials each year.
As you will see on the syllabus, the
course works off of the standard Supreme Court antitrust canon. Blasts from the
past, such as Trans-Missouri, which I
just can’t prevent myself from teaching given its historic role (Dennis Carlton
and I explore that, among other things, in a paper
forthcoming in an NBER volume on antitrust and regulation). I often teach cases
that the Court has granted cert on—this year Twombly and Weyerhaeuser—or
should have taken—like the Hatch-Waxman generic settlement cases (Valley Drug and Cardizem). The course also has a bit of an Antitrust/IP focus,
which reflects the field itself but also my research interests (papers on
Microsoft (here
and here);
Intel;
and copyright and competition policy (here and here)).
From a teaching standpoint, the class is a mix of Socratic
discussion and some lecturing on core economic concepts. I use PowerPoint to
lay out the economics and the hypos for discussion and post different pre- and
post-class slides (think with and without answers). I don’t intend the slides
to be used by the students to prepare for class but instead expect them to form
the basis for what we do in class. That means that I can, guilt-free, post the
slides right before class starts and students can download them using the
network connections in the classroom. Students like having a set of slides to
work with in class, both for note-taking and to be able to look at a concept
mid-class that I covered earlier that day. But I don’t want the “answers”
available before class, as I do think that it is important to explore blind
alleys. (Whether students pass the slides on from year to year I do not know,
but I do take the slides down before each quarter starts.) On the last day of
class, I do a review session and post an integrated set of slides for the
quarter (a very fat file).
The Network Industries course is usually
roughly 30-35 students. It is a toolkit course, meaning a course about
different legal tools used to approach the regulation of natural monopoly.
These days that usually has some sort of network, such as the grid for
transmitting electricity, at its core, though I pick up other forms of
interconnection as well. Again, no casebook, so edited materials, and
the same pre- and post-class slide setup. The only teaching wrinkle this
quarter is that I am using a class blog and am requiring
my students to make five posts across the course of the quarter (and two
comments per week). The blog will make up 25% of the grade. The idea behind the
blog is to push students to explore ideas in the course outside of the
crossfire of the classroom. It also means that we can add to the topics covered
in the course. I try to pick up on the posts in class (since I am using
PowerPoint, I have the laptop and projector anyhow, so all I need to add the
blog to class is a live Internet connection (most days that works)).
That gets us to the Antitrust and IP seminar (20 students or
so this year and links to the readings here). Usually
seminars meet for weekly for one quarter; we are meeting instead every other
week for two quarters. In contrast to Network Industries, where the blog is, if
all goes well, a pleasant addition to the course, the blog in the seminar is
central to the course. I used to have the students write relatively short
reaction papers to the readings and used those papers as the basis for class
discussion. I would slice and dice those papers into PowerPoint slides, pull up
the paper in quotes in class, and have students talk about their papers. But
the key problem with that is that the students didn’t have a good chance to
read papers by other students in the class, and I thought that they would
benefit from that.
Now we do all of that through the blog. The class is divided
into four groups, each group is assigned a posting/commenting window, and
groups rotate through the slots week by week. We then discuss the posts in our
class meeting time, again doing so using a laptop projector and a live Internet
connection to pull up the blog.
All of this content is open to the public and isn’t hidden
behind a university password requirement. The blogs often replicate the Annie
Hall/Woody Allen/Marshall McLuhan moment. In our first blog session in the
seminar, we were reading a paper by Ken Heyer at the Antitrust Division at the
Department of Justice. Ken jumped in with his two
cents in the comments (and I think offered to hire each of the students at
DOJ). Not a bad day’s work.
Oh, I am so shocked by the comment posted above.
Get off the blog, you big dummie! "college girl web cam".
Posted by:Joan A. Conway | February 02, 2007 at 01:59 PM
Did the college girl web cam read The President's Counselor, by Bill Minutaglio, concerning the Halls of Justice and alluding to Mary Magdelaine Church in Humble, Texas?
Posted by:Joan A. Conway | February 02, 2007 at 02:15 PM