Regulatory and Antitrust LawCornell

Certificate Program

It is important to assess the regulatory environment in which your business operates, including the rules, orders, and guidances that regulatory bodies issue that may affect your industry. In this course, you will be provided with the tools needed to identify regulatory bodies and their activities in your business area. You will examine the processes that regulatory bodies utilize as well as the connections they have to legal systems that affect your business. By understanding the avenues in which regulatory bodies communicate with your industry, you will be poised to support your teams as you stay current with developments affecting your role and beyond.

Note: The information provided in this course is for academic purposes and should not be used as a substitute for legal advice.

How can you influence regulatory policy in your industry? As you will discover, there are many ways you can support your legal team to impact regulatory policy before it is finalized, providing you and your teams with more flexibility to engage with your work in efficient, purposeful ways.

In this course, you will explore strategies for influencing regulatory policy before agencies finalize the policy. Specific strategies will support your learnings, challenging you to apply these perspectives to your specific industry. Additionally, you will evaluate the legal limits of and opportunities in assessing and disputing finalized regulations. As you become familiar with these approaches, you will recognize the benefits of strategically communicating with regulatory officials as well as the possible limits of relying on their advice and guidance. Through this course, you will gain strategies to bring back to your teams, serving you as you engage with regulation at your organization and your industry as a whole.

Note: The information provided in this course is for academic purposes and should not be used as a substitute for legal advice.

You are required to have completed the following course or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Assessing the Regulatory Environment

To understand the import and impact of current regulatory policies, engagement with the founding ones is crucial. In this course, you will gain this strategic perspective, starting with the late 19th century when oil and railroad industries were booming and becoming more powerful as they grew, raising the concern of some lawmakers. As a result, the Sherman Act was drafted and passed to ensure that competition continued to thrive and that no one individual or firm controlled too much of an industry. Later, legislators also added the Clayton Act to guard against mergers that thwart competition.

Through this course, you will discover how antitrust law was born with just three simple phrases and begin to understand how it has evolved from those beginnings, affecting the marketplace every day in the 21st century. One major way that firms compete is on price, and you will explore how courts have reacted as some firms got together and agreed on prices instead of competing. You will also examine court decisions on other agreements among competitors in business as well as professional organizations, sports leagues, and institutions of higher education. By the end of this course, you will have gained the necessary perspective on these major events to make informed, strategic decisions for your firm in today's marketplace.

In this course, you will focus on Section 2 of the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act, which forbids monopolies and states that mergers are illegal if the effect may be to substantially lessen competition, respectively. These laws don't have strict definitions, so it has been left to courts to interpret. You will walk through a series of court cases to examine what behaviors have come to define monopolistic conduct and how courts, as well as regulators, have tried to determine whether a merger should be prohibited because it will stifle competition. Through this course, you will gain a better understanding of the impact these laws and their interpretations have on the overall marketplace and your organization as you do business in the 21st century.

You are required to have completed the following course or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Antitrust and Horizontal Restraints on Trade