J. Gregory Sidak
Chairman
(202) 518-5121
jgsidak@criterioneconomics.com

J. Gregory Sidak is the founder and chairman of Criterion Economics, L.L.C. in Washington, D.C. and the Ronald Coase Professor of Law and Economics at Tilburg University in The Netherlands. He is an internationally recognized expert on antitrust, intellectual property, regulation of network industries, and complex economic litigation. Professor Sidak has testified as an expert witness in scores of proceedings before courts, regulatory commissions, international commercial arbitration panels, and committees of Congress. He has served in the U.S. government as both an economist and a lawyer. Professor Sidak has been a consultant to the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, the Republic of Mexico, and the Competition Bureau of Canada, as well as to major corporations in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Professor Sidak edits the Journal of Competition Law & Economics for the Oxford University Press and has written extensively on antitrust, intellectual property, and regulation. His books and articles have been cited by the Antitrust Division, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Supreme Court of the United States, the Supreme Court of Canada, the European Commission, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, the Supreme Court of California, and many other courts and regulatory commissions. Professor Sidak has taught at the Yale School of Management and the Georgetown University Law Center. He was educated at Stanford University and clerked for Judge Richard A. Posner.

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Professor Sidak has worked at the intersection of law and economics for three decades. At Stanford University, where he earned degrees in economics and law, he studied antitrust and regulation under Professor William F. Baxter in the years immediately before Baxter became head of the Antitrust Division and broke up the Bell System telephone monopoly. In 1981, Professor Sidak became Judge Richard A. Posner’s first law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. The Supreme Court first cited one of Professor Sidak’s articles on antitrust three years later, when he was twenty-eight years old. Since that time, Professor Sidak has been one of the most prolific scholars on antitrust and economic regulation.

Professor Sidak has published six books and more than eighty articles in scholarly journals and is ranked 8th among the top 1,500 U.S. legal scholars by the Social Science Research Network in terms of the number of downloads of his writings. Those writings have been cited in additional decisions of the Supreme Court, as well as in decisions of lower courts (including the Microsoft antitrust decision). American jurists whose opinions have cited Professor Sidak’s writings include Stephen Breyer, Frank Easterbrook, Douglas Ginsburg, Stephen Reinhardt, Laurence Silberman, David Souter, and Stephen Williams.

In 2004, Professor Sidak cofounded the Journal of Competition Law & Economics, a peer-reviewed journal published by the Oxford University Press that has become the preeminent international journal on antitrust law. In November 2007, Professor Sidak and Judge Robert Bork filed an amicus brief of antitrust scholars that successfully urged the Supreme Court to grant certiorari in Pacific Bell Telephone Co. v. linkLine Communications, Inc. to examine questions about the price squeeze theory of liability under section 2 of the Sherman Act, as well as the more fundamental question of whether the historic Alcoa monopolization decision of 1945 has been implicitly overruled by the Court’s consumer-oriented antitrust jurisprudence of the past three decades.

As an economic consultant, Professor Sidak has served clients in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. They include

Law firms with which Professor Sidak has worked as a consultant include

Professor Sidak’s consulting engagements have concerned antitrust, patents and intellectual property, network industries (telecommunications, the Internet, electricity, natural gas, transportation, and postal delivery), international trade, entertainment and sports, mass media, public utility regulation, spectrum auctions and policy, state-owned enterprises, breach of contract, covenants not to compete, securities fraud, complex economic litigation, damages, injunctive relief, and constitutional protection of private property and economic activity.

A number of Professor Sidak’s engagements have been the economic counterparts to a law firm’s “controversy practice,” in which an adverse development in litigation, regulation, or legislation fundamentally threatens a company’s competitive strategy or economic viability. Many of these controversies have been cases of first impression that subsequently generated landmark decisions. Professor Sidak’s consulting engagements have included:

• liability and remedies questions in the Microsoft antitrust case
• numerous FCC and state public utilities commission dockets concerning implementation of the Telecommunications Act of 1996
• earlier antitrust proceedings to vacate portions of the AT&T antitrust divestiture decree
• numerous matters involving telecommunications deregulation, rate regulation, and industry restructuring in Europe, Asia, and Australia
• analysis of compensation owed to Cable & Wireless for the premature termination of its exclusive franchise for international calls in Hong Kong following the handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China
• numerous spectrum auctions and related controversies in the United States and Europe
• a bench trial in federal court concerning a claim by Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) for a tax refund for an investment credit in infrastructure
• a test case by U S West (now Qwest) in the Court of Federal Claims to establish that regulated rates set by the Federal Communications Commission for unbundled network elements effected an uncompensated taking of private property
• antitrust and regulation testimony successfully opposing the proposed merger of direct broadcast satellite operators DirecTV and EchoStar
• the World Trade Organization's first arbitration pursuant to the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), which concerned the U.S.-Mexico telecommunications dispute concerning international settlement rates for calls from the United States to Mexico
• stranded cost recovery proceedings and electricity restructurings for investor-owned utilities in Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and New Mexico
• the first complete acquisition of a U.S. telecommunications carrier (VoiceStream) by a foreign carrier (Deutsche Telekom)
• the European Commission's predatory pricing case against Deutsche Post, at the time one of Europe's largest state-owned enterprises
• many of the major telecommunications mergers in the United States since the mid-1990s
• an international arbitration in The Hague over a contractual dispute concerning obligations of India's signatory to the Fiber-optic Link Around the Globe (FLAG) venture to make continuing investments in infrastructure to support the consortium's submarine cable
• an international arbitration in London over interpretation of a covenant not to compete concerning a joint venture to provide cell phone service in eastern Europe
• the proposed merger of PECO Energy and PSEG
• competitive and regulatory implications of the WorldCom fraud and bankruptcy
• a fraud action against Salomon Smith Barney initiated by the largest individual outside shareholder of WorldCom
• a study for a group of incumbent network operations and equipment manufacturers about the effect of infrastructure competition on the rate of broadband penetration in Europe
• regulation of mobile telephone termination rates
• analysis for several European incumbent telecommunications operators of regulators' proposals to mandate the structural or functional separation of network operations from network services
• analysis of proposals to mandate "network neutrality" regulation of the Internet
• legislative and regulatory proceedings that changed the antitrust and regulatory scrutiny of the U.S. Postal Service, the largest state-owned enterprise in the United States
• a jury trial in California state court concerning an alleged tie-in by a local operating company of AT&T
• analysis of "patent holdup" and related antitrust issues in standards-setting organizations in high-technology industries
• the implications upon remand of the Stores Block Decision by the Supreme Court of Canada concerning the private property rights of a public utility
• an International Trade Commission section 337 exclusion order proceeding concerning alleged patent infringement in a high-technology industry
• an international arbitration concerning antitrust, breach of contract, and patent misuse claims over the licensing of intellectual property
• an economic analysis of materiality in response to a Wells letter from the Securities and Exchange Commission in an investigation of alleged insider trading by the CEO of a Fortune 500 corporation in violation of Rule 10b-5

In addition to performing these and other consulting engagements, Professor Sidak served from 2002 to 2004 as a member of the U.S. Advisory Board for NTT DoCoMo, a position in which he briefed the chairman and senior management on emerging regulatory and antitrust trends relevant to Japan’s largest wireless telecommunications company.

Professor Sidak has made presentations on antitrust or regulatory matters to principals and staff at the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the European Commission’s Directorate General for Competition, the European Commission’s Information Society and Media Directorate General, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Ofcom (United Kingdom), the New York Attorney General, the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce, the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Cofitel (Mexico), the Mexican Congress, the Mexican Ministry of Communications and Transport, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

From 1992 through 2005, Professor Sidak was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI), where he directed AEI’s Studies in Telecommunications Deregulation and held the F.K. Weyerhaeuser Chair in Law and Economics. From 1993 to 1999, Professor Sidak was a Senior Lecturer at the Yale School of Management, where he taught courses on telecommunications regulation with Dean Paul W. MacAvoy. From 2005 to 2007, Professor Sidak was a Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, where he taught courses on antitrust law and telecommunications regulation.

Professor Sidak has served in the federal government as both an economist and a lawyer. He was Deputy General Counsel of the Federal Communications Commission from 1987 to 1989 and Senior Counsel and Economist to the Council of Economic Advisers in the Executive Office of the President from 1986 to 1987. After leaving government, Professor Sidak practiced law with Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C., on antitrust cases and federal administrative, legislative, and appellate matters concerning telecommunications and other regulated industries. Early in his career, Professor Sidak worked as a management consultant with the Boston Consulting Group and as an attorney with O’Melveny & Myers.

Professor Sidak’s most influential books are Deregulatory Takings and the Regulatory Contract: The Competitive Transformation of Network Industries in the United States (Cambridge University Press 1997), with Daniel F. Spulber, and Toward Competition in Local Telephony (MIT Press 1994), with William J. Baumol. The Supreme Court has cited both books. His scholarly writings have appeared in many journals, including the American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings, the Columbia Law Review, the Harvard International Law Journal, the Journal of Political Economy, the Stanford Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal. His essays have appeared in many newspapers and business periodicals, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Professor Sidak is frequently interviewed and quoted by newspapers, magazines, and news organizations such as the Asahi Shinbum, the BBC, Bloomberg, The Daily Telegraph, The Economist, Fox News, Forbes, La Reforma (Mexico City), the Los Angeles Times, the Mainichi newspapers, MSNBC, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, the Nihon Keizai Shinbum (the Nikkei), NPR’s All Things Considered, the Sankei Shinbum, and the Wall Street Journal.

Professor Sidak earned A.B. (1977) and A.M. (1981) degrees in economics and a J.D. (1981), all from Stanford University. He was a member of the Stanford Law Review.