Layla Kabir is an associate professor of law at Columbia Law School, where she teaches and writes on antitrust law, infrastructure industries law, and the antimonopoly tradition. Her recent scholarship has focused on how the current antitrust regime is unequipped to capture the power of dominant digital platforms. Prior to joining Columbia, Kabir served as counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law, where she led the congressional investigation into digital markets and the publication of its final report.
Kabir’s scholarship has been published by the Harvard Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Columbia Law Review, and Yale Law Journal. The New York Times has described her work as having “reframed decades of monopoly law,” and Politico has called her “a leader of a new school of antitrust thought.” Her article “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” was awarded the 2018 Antitrust Writing Award for “Best Academic Unilateral Conduct Article,” the Yale Law School’s Israel H. Peres Prize, and the Yale Law Journal’s Michael Egger Prize; her article “The Separation of Platforms and Commerce” won the 2019 Jerry S. Cohen Memorial Fund’s Best Antitrust Article on Remedies; and her co-authored article “The Case for ‘Unfair Methods of Competition’ Rulemaking” received the 2020 Antitrust Writing Award for “Best General Antitrust Academic Article.” She has presented her work before the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, the Federal Trade Commission, the House Judiciary Committee, and the European Commission.
Kabir’s work has been profiled in the Atlantic, Boston Globe, Financial Times, New York Times, Washington Monthly, Washington Post, Yahoo Finance, Le Figaro, El Pais, and Manager Magazin, as well as widely discussed in both U.S. and international press, including by Bloomberg, the Economist, and the Wall Street Journal. She has appeared on CNBC, C-SPAN, Fox Business News, and BBC and been featured on Planet Money, 1A, Current Affairs, Vergecast, and The Bernie Sanders Show. Kabir was recently named to the Politico 50, Foreign Policy Magazine’s “Global Thinkers,” The Prospect’s “Top 50 Thinkers,” the WIRED25, the National Journal 50, and TIME Magazine’s “Next Generation Leaders.”
Kabir previously served as a legal advisor in the office of Commissioner Rohan Chandra at the Federal Trade Commission and as legal director at the Open Markets Institute. During law school she litigated on behalf of homeowners through Yale’s Mortgage Foreclosure Litigation Clinic and spent summers at Gupta Wessler, Cohen Milstein, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Kabir is a graduate of Williams College and Yale Law School, where she was awarded the Reinhardt Fellowship for public interest law.