ROBERT PITOFSKY: Business law is one of the strongest areas of the law school’s teaching. The senior people in tax, corporations, antitrust, and securities are recognized throughout the country as being preeminent in their fields. Every one of these people has either been in the private sector or government for a good long time, in a law firm, or continued as consultants to major corporations or the government while on the faculty. And I think the training that students need should include a good dose of practical knowledge. To just teach law students theory about securities or tax and not dig into the details of the rules and cases would not train them well for their careers. It doesn’t hurt that we’re in Washington and, therefore, if a student wants to get some practical experience in business law, he or she can either work at a firm or in the government in the summer or take an internship during the school year. If you’re in some isolated academic community, not adjacent to a business center, you’re just not going to be able to do that.

     My career is unusual in that I’ve been in the government four times. Academia is my base, but I leave and come back on a fairly regular basis. What do I get out of academia, why do I keep coming back? The main reason is that I enjoy teaching, and I enjoy the classroom. Second, I still have an interest in scholarly debate. I’ve just spent a year with two colleagues doing a fifth edition of our casebook trying to bring in new materials. I have taught in other areas, in public law areas, but I keep coming back to economic regulation, consumer protection, and antitrust.
     Especially with antitrust, whether you agree or disagree with the merits of the free market protected by antitrust, there is a certain logic about it. It’s not just what Congress thought would be a good idea one year when they passed a statute. There was a whole integrated system of thinking about how to protect the free market, which I find very interesting. And I only find it more so now that so many other countries around the world are moving in the direction of antitrust systems.
     If you look back over the many years that I’ve been writing, much of my work has to do with mergers and joint ventures. And that came in handy since the greatest merger wave in the history of the country occurred while I was chairman of the Federal Trade Commission in the 1990s. What I’ve said in a number of articles is that we have changed radically in this country, from a populist antitrust system that was extremely interventionist to a minimalist antitrust system that virtually put the whole discipline to sleep. The idea of the late ’80s and ’90s was to try to find a middle ground that wasn’t as intrusive as the ’60s and wasn’t as minimalist as the early ’80s and see if we could find something that would survive the next election – so that we don’t keep bouncing from fairly far to the left to fairly far to the right. So far, so good, I think, in terms of continuity.
     Microsoft is a very important case not just because it caught everybody’s attention but also because the substance of it is very important. I’ve said publicly that the decision by the unanimous Court of Appeals against Microsoft was a superb piece of legal analysis. And then the case was settled on terms that, in the view of many, were not all that the government was entitled to. From my point of view, the case is really about how this old system of regulation, called antitrust, applies to the highest of high-tech. And I thought the Court of Appeals did an outstanding job of integrating antitrust into a more modern sector of the economy.