Lina Khan

The title of Khan's piece was a reference to Robert Bork's 1978 book The Antitrust Paradox, which established the consumer-welfare standard that Khan critiqued.

She proposed alternative frameworks for antitrust policy, including "restoring traditional antitrust and competition policy principles or applying common carrier obligations and duties."

Lina M. Khan (born March 3, 1989) is a British-born American legal scholar serving as chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) since 2021.

She is also an associate professor of law at Columbia Law School.

While a student at Yale Law School, she became known for her work in antitrust and competition law in the United States after publishing the influential essay "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox".

She was nominated by President Joe Biden to the Commission in March 2021, and has served since June 2021 following her confirmation.

During her tenure as chairwoman, the FTC has pushed to ban non-compete agreements, filed lawsuits against health care companies engaging in anti-competitive practices, and launched a high-profile lawsuit against Amazon.

In 2022, the FTC and the DOJ's anti-trust division blocked a record number of mergers on anti-trust grounds.

Khan was born on March 3, 1989, in London, to a British family of Pakistani origin.

Khan grew up in Golders Green in the London Borough of Barnet.

Her parents, a management consultant and an employee of Thomson Reuters, moved to the United States when she was 11 years old.

The family settled in Mamaroneck, New York, where she and her brother attended public school.

Khan said that her parents experienced racism and xenophobia in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

At Mamaroneck High School, Khan was involved in the student newspaper.

After high school, Khan studied political science at Williams College in Massachusetts.

She also attended the University of Oxford as an undergraduate visiting student at Exeter College.

Khan served as editor of the Williams College student newspaper and wrote her senior thesis on Hannah Arendt.

She graduated in 2010 with a Bachelor of Arts.

From 2010 to 2014, Khan worked at the New America Foundation, where she engaged in anti-monopoly research and writing for Barry Lynn at the Open Markets Program.

Lynn was looking for a researcher without a background in economics, and he began critiquing market consolidation with Khan's help.

As a result of her work at the Open Markets Institute, Khan was offered a reporting position at The Wall Street Journal, where she would have covered commodities.

During the same period, Khan was offered admission into Yale Law School.

Describing it as "a real 'choose the path' moment", Khan ultimately chose to enroll at Yale.

Khan served as a submissions editor for the Yale Journal on Regulation.

Joshua Wright, who served on the FTC from 2013 to 2015, derided her work as "hipster antitrust" and argued it "reveal[ed] a profound lack of understanding of the consumer welfare model and the rule of reason framework."

Herbert Hovenkamp 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."

After graduating from law school, Khan worked as legal director at the Open Markets Institute.

The institute split from New America after Khan and her team criticized Google's market power, prompting pressure from Google, a funder of New America.

During her time at OMI, Khan met with Senator Elizabeth Warren to discuss anti-monopolistic policy ideas.

Initially planning to clerk for Judge Stephen Reinhardt on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, 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.

She went on to graduate from Yale in 2017 with a Juris Doctor degree.

In 2017, during her third year at Yale Law School, the Yale Law Journal published Khan's student article "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox".

The article made a significant impact in American legal and business circles, and 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.

For "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox", Khan won the Antitrust Writing Award for "Best Academic Unilateral Conduct Article" in 2018, the Israel H. Peres Prize by Yale Law School, and the Michael Egger Prize from the Yale Law Journal.

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.

Makan Delrahim, then serving as Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division under Donald Trump, praised Khan for her “fresh thinking on how our legal tools apply to new digital platforms.”

In July 2020, Khan joined the school's faculty as an associate professor of law.