The aspirational speech was typical of the way Khan, who is taking on corporate giants like Amazon and Microsoft, is greeted by campus denizens. And she’s not the only one. A few minutes later, the Justice Department’s chief antitrust enforcer Jonathan Kanter and his top deputy, Doha Mekki, arrived to glad-hand the students they hope to rally to their cause. Students, advocates, enforcers and congressional staffers exchanged congratulatory “Happy merger guidelines day” un-ironically.
The movement that Khan helped build has reached law schools across the country, attracting scores of trustbuster mini-mes. Once sparsely attended antitrust classrooms are bursting at Loyola University Chicago Law School. A quarter of students’ submissions to the Georgetown Law Journal focused on antitrust last year. And when Kanter filled a 200-person room at Columbia Law School, he stayed so long afterward to shake hands he missed his flight.
There’s even merch. At the Anti-Monopoly Summit held this May in Washington, attendees picked up a union-made mug bearing the names of President Joe Biden’s antitrust enforcers. Cabinet officials and senators spoke, and the president himself recorded a cheerleading video message for attendees. After years of mainstream indifference, the movement finally has clout.
Whether it’s a force with real staying power or a passing fad is yet unknown. But Khan, Kanter and their allies clearly hope that cultivating the next generation can help ground it.
Emma Wallace rattled off the names on the mug — Wu, Khan and Kanter — and blurted, “Oh my God, these are like nerdy superheroes, right?”
A student at Loyola University Chicago Law School, Wallace found herself drawn to the new antitrust revival after reading The Master Switch by Tim Wu, who would go on to become Biden’s White House competition czar. As a college student at Fordham University, Wallace said she would walk past the Time Warner buildings during their proposed deal to merge with AT&T and think to herself, “All that power, all that consolidation.”
When Zaakir Tameez arrived at Yale Law School — Khan’s legal training ground — he was eager to find a way to channel his frustration with the country’s vast inequality. Antitrust was the answer, and Yale, he realized, was an intellectual hotbed of antitrust scholarship.
“Antitrust at Yale is full of brainiacs and bros,” he explained. “Brainiacs who are critically undermining the broken assumptions of traditional antitrust theory. And bros who want to see antitrust enforcers flex their muscles and show their guns.” (He didn’t say which camp he fell in.)
Khan, who happens to be not much older than many law students, is at least partially responsible for inspiring young people to turn to antitrust. After seeing her at the FTC, it’s clear that the DOJ’s civil rights division and the EPA aren’t the only options for those seeking a vehicle for change.
Khan’s rise has been rapid. In 2017, while a student at Yale Law School, Khan authored a paper called “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” that sought to reframe antitrust law and single out the internet’s top dog as a monopolistic monstrosity. Khan was well-schooled in the issues, having spent several years as a journalist and researcher at the antimonopoly group, the Open Markets Institute, while being mentored by its leader Barry Lynn, who has long argued for an antitrust revolution.
In a series of events that’s now movement lore, Khan’s article elevated her profile, opening doors in Congress and leading to a plum academic job at Columbia Law School. She didn’t stay long before being tapped to lead the FTC at the age of 32.
The Covid pandemic and its fallout supercharged the push to rethink antitrust policy. Americans saw sudden shortages of critical necessities and a rise in evictions and unemployment. And whenever there’s a recession, law schools tend to get more popular. The number of law school applicants jumped nearly 13 percent in 2021, the biggest increase since 2002 when the dot-com bubble burst and sent hordes studying for the LSAT.
With growing interest in antitrust, student demand led more law schools to hire professors solely to teach the subject, several professors said; before then, schools would frequently offer the course every other year or not at all. New chapters of Law and Political Economy Project, a left-leaning academic network that backs the aggressive antitrust agenda, have been sprouting up at law schools across the country. And the federal agencies that handle antitrust policy are eager to match growing student appetite, hiring more recent law school grads and developing relationships on campuses.
Tina LaRitz, a recent graduate of NYU Law School, started an antitrust student group with Sharvari Kothawade, after falling “in love” with it during a DOJ summer internship. The government was sure to return the affection: Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Doha Mekki spoke at the NYU group’s first event.