Author: Maria Messina

On May 9, 2021, Rosario Livatino, a magistrate little known outside of Italy, was beatified. In the basilica cathedral of Agrigento in Sicily, the faithful venerated the bloodied shirt worn by Blessed Rosario during the moment of his horrific murder by the Stidda, a rival gang of the more famous Sicilian Mafia. In Rome, Pope Francis commented, “In his service to the common good, as an exemplary judge who never succumbed to corruption, he sought to judge not to condemn but to redeem . . . . His work placed him firmly under the protection of God. For this reason, he became a witness to the Gospel even unto a heroic death.”

People outside of Italy might imagine that the violent mob murder of a magistrate perhaps occurred in the time of Al Capone, of tommy guns, and Prohibition. However, Blessed Rosario was gunned down off the side of a highway in Sicily on the morning of September 21, 1990, a date firmly within the lifetime of most adults. Whereas in the United States mob violence is viewed as distant history or associated with popular films or television shows, for the people of Sicily this was the reality of recent memory, in which the brutal mafia wars blurred the lines between gangland violence and terrorism.

Blessed Rosario Livatino was born on October 3, 1952, in the small town of Canicattì, in the province of Agrigento. In 1975, he completed his law degree in Palermo. On the top of his thesis, he wrote three letters: STD, or Sub Tutela Dei. Thus, from the very beginning of his legal career Blessed Rosario entrusted his work as a lawyer and judge to God.

Over the course of his legal career, Blessed Rosario progressed from prosecutor to magistrate. His colleagues recall his rigorous and inflexible application of the law, while at the same time his ability to recognize the humanity in even the most hardened criminals. He understood that there was great disorganization and corruption in the region resulting in ineffectual and fragmented investigations. Blessed Rosario’s requests for greater coordination among law enforcement resulted in the closure of a local bank considered to be the safe deposit box for the mafia. These efforts resulted in the increase of threats against Blessed Rosario and his family. However, he was not swayed. Strengthened by his Catholic faith, he hungered for justice.

Only days before his thirty-eighth birthday, Blessed Rosario drove alone to the courthouse to begin his day of work, having refused an armed escort. Stidda assassins drove his vehicle off the road and Blessed Rosario was gunned down. In the investigation that followed, the perpetrators testified that they had committed their heinous crime because Blessed Rosario was immune to corruption. The mafiosi mocked Blessed Rosario’s Catholic faith and revealed that they had originally planned to murder him leaving the church where he daily adored the Blessed Sacrament. This was truly a murder in odium fidei. It is therefore not surprising that on the same day as Blessed Rosario’s beatification, the Vatican Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development announced the establishment of a working group committed to the excommunication of mafia members.

Blessed Rosario did not separate his life as a Catholic from his role as a lawyer or magistrate, though he lived his faith in humility. Every day he could be found at Mass, and in adoration before the Blessed Sacrament. This life of prayer and devotion provided him with the strength that enabled him to resist societal pressures and the temptation of lucrative corruption in order to take action for justice, and to root out the evil poisoning his beloved home. His was not a faith segregated to a private sphere, but rather his animating force, the light of Christ guiding him on the path of justice as a humble servant of the common good.

On December 9, the Federal Trade Commission and 48 state attorneys general, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, filed separate antitrust complaints in the federal district court for the District of Columbia.  The complaints allege violations of Section 2 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. § 2, and Section 7 of the Clayton Act, 15 U.S.C. § 18.  The FTC and State AGs request extraordinary equitable relief “sufficient to restore the competition that would exist absent the conduct alleged,” specifically the divestiture of Instagram and WhatsApp.

Of course, the FTC cleared Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatApp when they were subjected to antitrust review at the time of the transactions in 2012 and 2014, respectively.  This is not surprising.  As I wrote in October, “[b]oth Democratic and Republican administrations were blinded into regulatory inaction by the myth of entrepreneurship nurtured by the industry’s extensive lobbying and campaign contributions.”  Fault for Facebook’s allegedly dominant position in the defined market should be laid squarely at the doorstep of regulators asleep at the wheel.

Continue reading “A Comment on Facebook, Antitrust, and the Common Good” →

Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice, accompanied by 11 state attorneys general, sued Google under Section 2 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. § 2.  The action seeks to “restrain [Google] from unlawfully maintaining monopolies in the markets for general search services, search advertising, and general search text advertising in the United States through anticompetitive and exclusionary practices, and to remedy the effects of this conduct.”  While widely lauded as decisive action against the power of “Big Tech”, this complaint will usher in years of mind-numbingly expensive litigation led by the top law firms in the country, the success or failure of which will hinge on a battle of economists seeking to prove or disprove the complaint’s carefully chosen markets.  Daubert motions will be as dispositive as any motion to dismiss or summary judgment.  The court will come to its conclusion based on hundred-page economist expert reports, and after analyzing a dizzying array of graphs and regressions.

Many antitrust scholars decry the chokehold of the economists on contemporary antitrust jurisprudence, mostly blaming Chicago School economics and Robert Bork’s seminal 1978 book, The Antitrust Paradox.  See e.g., Barak Orbach, How Antitrust Lost Its Goal, 81 Fordham L. Rev. 2253 (2013).  These scholars see a break between prior antitrust enforcement focused on “trust busting,” and the subsequent adoption of a “consumer welfare test,” to be proven by economic analysis, as the center of U.S. antitrust law.  Far from being a complete departure, however, this development was the natural result of liberalism’s unraveling of business regulation from the common good. 

Continue reading “Antitrust and the Common Good” →