Lina Khan had spent the day doing TV interviews and press conferences defending the administration’s new tough-on-mergers stance. Now the chair of the Federal Trade Commission joined a more hospitable crowd. Squeezed into the corner of a bar steps from the White House, she urged law students not much younger than her to join the growing antitrust movement.
“This is just the very, very, very, very beginning of this work, and we need all of you to be in this movement, to be coming into government, to bring all your skills and talents to bear,” said Khan to whoops and cheers.
Waiting in the wings was an eager Columbia Law School student, Sahaj Sharda. He grasped the mic from Khan.
“Antitrust is like a great lever that lets the small lift up the large, opens new space for new ideas and inventions, enterprises and energy,” he said earnestly. “And you, the lawyers of tomorrow, are the fulcrum from which that lever draws its strength.”
The 34-year-old Khan stood nearby, a smile on her face.
Critics have called it “hipster” antitrust, but make no mistake: Antitrust is hip.
It’s been decades since government regulators were seen as anything but a punch line. Derided on the right as drags on the economy and on the left as rubber stamps for business, those in the federal bureaucracy aren’t accustomed to tributes. Now, as they aim to build an antitrust movement that would transform the economy, they’re on the receiving end of the kind of hero worship on display that summer evening — especially among law students.
The next generation of law students is obsessed with the FTC chief — and becoming foot soldiers in a potential antitrust revolution.
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