U.S. antitrust laws have repeatedly responded to the changing needs of the nation’s economy. As t... more U.S. antitrust laws have repeatedly responded to the changing needs of the nation’s economy. As the marketplace grows ever more data-driven, we find ourselves at yet another critical economic juncture that requires us to revisit antitrust practices to ensure healthy and sustainable competition. In this article, we propose two new antitrust approaches that fit into the existing regulatory landscape, detect signs of anticompetitive behavior early, and handle the unique nature of the digital marketplace. First, we advocate for an expanded definition of monopoly power under the Sherman Act that takes corporate data ownership into account. While current proxies for monopoly power, namely market share and price control, are symptoms of anticompetitive behavior, data ownership is increasingly its harbinger. Second, we advocate for an expanded premerger review process that seeks to prevent nascent competitors from being swallowed up by dominant players, a widespread practice that can be sho...
This paper demonstrate how NLP can be used to address an unmet need of the legal community and in... more This paper demonstrate how NLP can be used to address an unmet need of the legal community and increase access to justice. The paper introduces Legal Precedent Prediction (LPP), the task of predicting relevant passages from precedential court decisions given the context of a legal argument. To this end, the paper showcases a BERT model, trained on 530,000 examples of legal arguments made by U.S. federal judges, to predict relevant passages from precedential court decisions given the context of a legal argument. In 96% of unseen test examples the correct target passage is among the top-10 predicted passages. The same model is able to predict relevant precedent given a short summary of a complex and unseen legal brief, predicting the precedent that was actually cited by the brief’s co-author, former U.S. Solicitor General and current U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan.
U.S. antitrust laws have repeatedly responded to the changing needs of the nation’s economy. As t... more U.S. antitrust laws have repeatedly responded to the changing needs of the nation’s economy. As the marketplace grows ever more data-driven, we find ourselves at yet another critical economic juncture that requires us to revisit antitrust practices to ensure healthy and sustainable competition. In this article, we propose two new antitrust approaches that fit into the existing regulatory landscape, detect signs of anticompetitive behavior early, and handle the unique nature of the digital marketplace. First, we advocate for an expanded definition of monopoly power under the Sherman Act that takes corporate data ownership into account. While current proxies for monopoly power, namely market share and price control, are symptoms of anticompetitive behavior, data ownership is increasingly its harbinger. Second, we advocate for an expanded premerger review process that seeks to prevent nascent competitors from being swallowed up by dominant players, a widespread practice that can be sho...
This paper demonstrate how NLP can be used to address an unmet need of the legal community and in... more This paper demonstrate how NLP can be used to address an unmet need of the legal community and increase access to justice. The paper introduces Legal Precedent Prediction (LPP), the task of predicting relevant passages from precedential court decisions given the context of a legal argument. To this end, the paper showcases a BERT model, trained on 530,000 examples of legal arguments made by U.S. federal judges, to predict relevant passages from precedential court decisions given the context of a legal argument. In 96% of unseen test examples the correct target passage is among the top-10 predicted passages. The same model is able to predict relevant precedent given a short summary of a complex and unseen legal brief, predicting the precedent that was actually cited by the brief’s co-author, former U.S. Solicitor General and current U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan.
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Papers by Robert Mahari