In September of 2023, The Atlantic published an article by Georgetown Law Professor and Open Markets Institute scholar, Caroline Fredrickson, entitled “What I Most Regret About My Decades of Legal Activism.”
The article sent the legal establishment spinning by revealing how the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe and other abridgments of civil liberties are in many ways a direct result of a failure to sufficiently understand and oppose conservative assaults on business regulation, unions, class-action lawsuits, and–especially–antitrust enforcement. Specifically, Fredrickson revealed the workings of a judicial strategy that monopolists and cultural conservatives have used over the last 40 years to restrict or even destroy many fundamental American social and political liberties.
The mission of the Law and Political Economy Program at Open Markets is to undo this damage by breaking the Right’s chokehold on the judiciary and restoring pro-democracy regulation to political economic law and enforcement. To do this, the program’s early work and scholarship focuses on exposing pro-corporate philosophies and the ways in which conservative activists and funders have embedded them in our institutions.
Executive director Barry Lynn spoke at The 2025 Antitrust and Competition Conference, hosted by the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.