Assistant Professor of Law Daniel Francis has been named the overall winner of the 23rd Annual Jerry S. Cohen Memorial Fund Writing Award, which recognizes “outstanding contributions to antitrust scholarship.” Moses H. Grossman Professor of Law Scott Hemphill won a category award for an article he coauthored on antitrust remedies.
Francis’s award is for his article “Monopolizing by Conditioning,” published last year in the Columbia Law Review. “Across the economy, monopolists of all kinds are engaged in ‘conditional dealing,’” he explains in the article. “This is the practice of unilaterally offering benefits and penalties, or bribes and threats, to induce trading partners to refrain from competing against the monopolist or from dealing with its rivals.” For example: a social network might offer interoperability to apps on the condition that they refrain from competing against the network. Francis’s article offers a new framework for analyzing such practices under US monopolization law.
Announcing the award, the American Antitrust Institute (AAI) noted that Francis’s article “meaningfully advances our understanding of the harms that arise from monopolists' conditional dealing, why the current legal regime has failed to confront those harms, and how to fix the problem.” The award was presented on May 29 in Washington, DC, at the AAI’s annual policy conference.
Hemphill’s category award is for “Shorting Your Rivals: Negative Ownership as an Antitrust Remedy,” coauthored with Ian Ayres at Yale Law School and Abraham Wickelgren of the University of Texas at Austin School of law and published last year in the Antitrust Law Journal. Hemphill was a Cohen Award recipient in 2020 and 2013.
Francis writes and teaches about regulation and competition. Before joining the faculty, he served as deputy director of the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Competition, where he earlier served as associate director for digital markets. He is the co-author, with Murray and Kathleen Bring Professor of Law Christopher Jon Sprigman, of Antitrust: Principles, Cases, and Materials, a free antitrust casebook in wide use across the United States. Hemphill’s scholarship ranges broadly, from drug patents to digital platforms to the use of trademark law to thwart competition, and he is a co-director of the Law School’s Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy.
Posted June 13, 2025