Subject: L&E Colloquium for Friday, Dec. 4: Joshua Fischman
From: Brian Galle <[email-masked]>
To: Law Faculty and Visitors <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2015 18:55:47 +0000

Greetings, friends & colleagues.  I can tell by the giant pile of leftover squash casserole that it must be the last week of the semester.  That means our speaker this week will be Joshua Fischman of Northwestern Law School (filling in for Alan Schwartz, who suffered a self-inflicted scheduling conflict; Alan is recovering nicely from his calendar faux pas and will be back on our schedule soon).

Josh is presenting his paper, "Can a Court Infer the Law from a Settlement? Unraveling the Logic of Actavis."  Folks who have followed patent, anti-trust, or drug & device law lately may know that Actavis is the supreme court decision about the practice of "reverse payment," whereby a drug manufacturer pays off potential generic competitors not to sue to invalidate its patent.   The Actavis decision allows some reverse payments, but gives lower courts guidance on which payments may represent collusive anti-competitive activity.  Josh argues this guidance makes no sense, largely from the perspective of the theories of judicial decision making (and the game theory of private party responses to it) that are one of his areas of interest.

Guests who may want to split their time between our session and the symposium on economic inequality are welcome to come and go as they see fit, as long as they don't take all the chocolate chip cookies.

Josh's paper is attached.

BDG

Brian Galle
Professor of Law
Georgetown University Law Center
(202) 662-4039
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=332937