The former FTC chair takes her wrongheaded ideas to a new perch at Columbia.
The former FTC chair takes her wrongheaded ideas to a new perch at Columbia.
T he old adage of “those who can’t do, teach” remains undefeated. Last month, Joe Biden’s former Federal Trade Commission Chairman Lina Khan announced she is launching the Center for Law and the Economy at Columbia University, which will be jointly run by Khan and Lev Menand, a law professor.
Khan has taught off and on at the school since 2020, but this new venture will put her in a position to oversee the development of students who similarly seek to use their degrees as a method for infusing their economic beliefs into the law. The only issue? Her own attempts to do so failed spectacularly, and for an obvious reason: Most of Khan’s agenda was in opposition to constitutional law, not working through it.
As the youngest FTC chair to ever serve, Khan rose to prominence early in her career thanks to her 2017 Yale Law Journal article “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” which argued that Amazon should be targeted for monopolistic practices despite the fact that it wasn’t a monopoly at all. In Khan’s mind, the legal jurisprudence that had governed antitrust law for decades, known as the consumer welfare standard, was outdated. The consumer welfare standard asks, “Is a company a monopoly, and if so, has it used its power to harm consumers?” Only if that standard is met does the government have the right to take up antitrust actions against a company. The consumer welfare standard was a desperately needed bit of guidance in the early 1980s. Up until then, the government had wreaked havoc in the market, frequently targeting companies due to political bias or for simply being popular.
Khan’s contrasting theory was essentially that a business being big is inherently a sign that the organization in question is bad, and that the internal practices they use to maintain their market advantage should be grounds for action against them. Like most progressives, Khan sees success as proof of immorality.
Once she was FTC chairman, Khan did indeed seek to target Amazon (as well as several other popular American companies). Her office’s antitrust lawsuit against the company argued (hilariously, I might add) that the company used corrupt practices like prohibiting sellers on its platform from offering their products elsewhere at a lower price and that it self-preferenced its own products in search results. The horror.
But in all seriousness, any company not taking these commonsense steps to ensure its success would certainly run afoul of its board and investors. What was Amazon supposed to be running, a charity for other businesses?
While this lawsuit is still ongoing and Khan herself has been dismissed from her public role, her attempt to rewrite antitrust law and develop a new framework for regulation is largely considered a bust. Every case in which Khan pursued a novel or expanded antitrust theory was rejected by the courts, and her broader rule-making agenda was dismantled. A staff report by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability concluded, “Chair Khan has abused her authority at the agency, trampling on the due process rights of regulated parties, upending the rule of law, and violating ethics standards she is bound to uphold. The Committee has found that Chair Khan has consistently betrayed the obligation of the Commission to be an independent, bipartisan agency.”
I suppose it is in keeping with progressives’ broader worldview that Khan is essentially continuously failing up in the Democratic Party. Her own lack of success seems to be proof to their institutions that she is gallantly fighting against the oppressor class. Aside from her latest venture at Columbia, Khan was also picked up by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign: Last November, she became co-chair of his transition team, advising the democratic socialist on consumer protections and vetting the top legal jobs in his administration.
Now, it seems she’ll be working to indoctrinate the upcoming legal minds at one of the nation’s top law schools with her “neo-Brandeisian” ideology. Let’s hope she’s as bad at teaching as she was at suing.