KHAN
Lina

• 1. Early life
• 2. Academic career
• 2.1. Amazon's Antitrust Paradox
• 2.2. Open Markets Institute and Columbia Law School

Lina M. Khan is an American legal scholar and chair of the Federal Trade Commission. While a student at Yale Law School, she became known for her work in antitrust and competition law in the United States. She was appointed by President Joe Biden to the Commission in March 2021, and has served since June 2021. She is also an associate professor of law at Columbia Law School.

Early life

Khan was born in London, United Kingdom on March 3, 1989 to Pakistani parents. Khan moved with them to the United States when she was 11 years old. In 2010, she graduated from Williams College, where she wrote her thesis on Hannah Arendt. During her time at Williams College, Khan served as the editor of the student newspaper.

After graduation, she went to work at the New America Foundation, where she did anti-monopoly research and writing for the Open Markets Program. She earned a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 2017, where she served as submissions editor of the Yale Journal on Regulation.

Academic career

Khan researched and published on market consolidation issues at the New America Foundation until 2014, when she began attending Yale Law School. While at Yale, Khan was a co-student director of Yale's Mortgage Foreclosure Litigation Clinic, where she represented homeowners who were being improperly foreclosed on by financial institutions. She also spent a summer working at Gupta Wessler, a firm specializing in public interest and plaintiff-side appellate litigation.

Amazon's Antitrust Paradox

While still a law student at Yale University, Khan became a public figure in 2017 when her article in the Yale Law Journal, Amazon's Antitrust Paradox, made a significant impact in American legal and business circles. The New York Times described it as "reframing decades of monopoly law".

In the article, Khan argued that the current American antitrust law framework, which focuses on keeping consumer prices down, cannot account for the anticompetitive effects of platform-based business models such as that of Amazon. She proposed alternative approaches for doing so, including "restoring traditional antitrust and competition policy principles or applying common carrier obligations and duties."

The article was met with both acclaim and criticism. As of September 2018, it received 146,255 hits, "a runaway best-seller in the world of legal treatises," according to the New York Times. Joshua Wright, who served on the FTC from 2013 to 2015, derided her work as "hipster antitrust" and argued it "reveal a profound lack of understanding of the consumer welfare model and the rule of reason framework." Herbert Hovenkamp, who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations, wrote that Khan's claims are "technically undisciplined, untestable, and even incoherent", and that her work "never explains how a nonmanufacturing retailer such as Amazon could ever recover its investment in below cost pricing by later raising prices, and even disputes that raising prices to higher levels ever needs to be a part of the strategy, thus indicating that it is confusing predation with investment."

Open Markets Institute and Columbia Law School

After completing her studies, Khan worked as legal director at the Open Markets Institute, which was spun off from New America after Khan and her team criticized Google's market power, prompting pressure from Google, which was a funder of New America. During her time at OMI, Khan met with Senator Elizabeth Warren to discuss anti-monopolistic policy ideas.

Khan joined Columbia Law School as an academic fellow, where she pursued research and scholarship on antitrust law and competition policy, especially relating to digital platforms. She published The Separation of Platforms and Commerce in the Columbia Law Review, making the case for structural separations that prohibit dominant intermediaries from entering lines of business that place them in direct competition with the businesses dependent on their networks. In July 2020, Khan joined the school's faculty as an Associate Professor of Law.

Khan has described herself as belonging to the New Brandeis movement, a political movement that seeks a revival in antitrust enforcement.