Sacramento, CA—Following news that the California Law Revision Commission (“the CLRC”) has approved initial recommendations for reforming California’s antiquated state antitrust law, including recommendations that state lawmakers adopt a law against illegal monopolization and a more flexible merger standard, the American Economic Liberties Project released the following statement.

“Antitrust reform is coming to California, and this multi-year study of the root causes of economic unfairness provides a new foundation for success,” said Lee Hepner, Sr. Legal Counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project. “At least on paper, California’s economy is booming, but it has become more and more difficult for workers and small business owners to participate in that success. Defenders of the status quo celebrate the ‘efficiency’ of speculative financial markets and wonder why Walgreen’s locks up deodorant. Antitrust might sound like a niche legal concept, but Californians know what it feels like to experience the symptoms of corporate greed and undistributed gains. Lawmakers have a new foundation for building a resilient, innovative and fair economy, and workers, consumer advocates, and tens of millions of residents are at their backs.”

The CLRC’s latest recommendations mirror the initial recommendations set forth in a January 2023 Letter to the Commission from the American Economic Liberties Project. While California’s antitrust law, the Cartwright Act, prohibits “concerted” action between two or more firms, California is one of only four states in the country without a law expressly prohibiting illegal monopolization by a single firm (so-called “single-firm conduct”). Despite this gap in state law, California has recently joined federal monopolization lawsuits against Google, Live Nation-Ticketmaster, Apple, and RealPage. A state-specific anti-monopoly law would allow Californians to bring cases in state court and re-affirm legal theories of antitrust that have been eroded by faulty interpretations by federal courts. In recent years, California has adopted industry-specific pre-merger notification laws, specifically in the grocery and healthcare industries, but does not have a unified approach for addressing mergers-to-monopoly across the broader state economy.

The CLRC is an independent commission created by the CA state legislature in 1953. The Commission is assigned topics of study by the California state legislature and provides non-binding recommendations to the legislature in return. The CLRC’s study of state antitrust law was initiated in 2022 by a bi-partisan resolution of the California State Assembly, led by CA Assemblymember Buffy Wicks and then-Assemblymember Jordan Cunningham. The California legislature is not bound by the CLRC’s recommendations but may introduce legislation to advance some or all of those recommendations. Historically, over 90% of the Commission’s recommendations have been enacted into law, affecting more than 22,500 sections of the California statutory codes.

Over the past two years, the Commission’s study has invited experts to participate in subject matter-specific working groups, and a growing number of advocates across labor, consumer protection, and small business have provided input throughout. In June 2024, AELP sent a letter to the Commission demanding that Google, which had just been declared an illegal monopolist in a California federal court, have its invitation to participate rescinded.

Learn more about Economic Liberties here.

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The American Economic Liberties Project works to ensure America’s system of commerce is structured to advance, rather than undermine, economic liberty, fair commerce, and a secure, inclusive democracy. Economic Liberties believes true economic liberty means entrepreneurs and businesses large and small succeed on the merits of their ideas and hard work; commerce empowers consumers, workers, farmers, and engineers instead of subjecting them to discrimination and abuse from financiers and monopolists; foreign trade arrangements support domestic security and democracy; and wealth is broadly distributed to support equitable political power.