C. Public Economic Law

Public economic law encompasses the statutes, regulations, and institutions that structure and govern economic activity. It includes the law of networks, platforms, and utilities (NPU law), antitrust and trade regulation, corporate governance and enterprise organization, labor law, tax law, IP, and administrative law. These areas of law work together to shape the production and consumption process. The “neoliberal” period, for example, was the result of an antitrust law focused on consumer welfare (narrowly defined), rate deregulation and contrived competition in NPU sectors, corporate governance doctrines and securities regulations that enhanced the ability of financial firms to influence business decision-making, labor laws that constrained unions, a tax code that strengthened financial firms, and an administrative law that allowed White House staff to facilitate agency deregulation, especially in NPU sectors. This Colloquium brings six leading scholars of public economic law to Columbia to present works-in- progress.