Maurice E. Stucke has spent thirty years at the forefront of competition law, privacy policy, AI, and the regulation of technology — as a federal prosecutor, a senior government advisor, a law professor, and counsel to governments and corporations around the world. His scholarship has been cited by U.S. federal courts, Congress, and policymakers across five continents. He has delivered over 250 invited lectures and keynotes in 30 countries.
Experience
Professor Stucke’s career spans three distinct but deeply connected roles.
Hired through the highly competitive Attorney General’s Honors Program, Prof. Stucke, as a prosecutor at the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division, successfully challenged anticompetitive mergers and restraints across numerous industries, led joint task forces with state attorneys general, and focused on policy issues at the intersection of antitrust and the media. As a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney, he prosecuted a range of felony and misdemeanor offenses. Earlier in his career, as an associate at Sullivan & Cromwell, he assisted Microsoft in the landmark antitrust case brought by the Department of Justice, represented Goldman Sachs in a private class action alleging price-fixing among Nasdaq market-makers, and defeated the SEC’s motion to strike CS First Boston’s estoppel claims. The Legal Aid Society recognized his criminal appellate and defense work with two awards.
As a Senior Policy Advisor to the Federal Trade Commission during the Biden administration, Professor Stucke advised the Chair and senior Commission leaders on competition, privacy, and consumer protection. He coordinated with other federal agencies and the White House Council of Economic Advisers on competition policy, worked with international competition authorities to produce a landmark report on the intersection of privacy and competition law, and brought deep expertise to the FTC’s efforts to address the growing power of digital platforms.
As the Lindsay Young Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee, he has authored five books published by Oxford University Press, HarperCollins, and Harvard University Press, and produced scholarship cited by U.S. federal courts, Congress, competition agencies, and policymakers across the globe. He publishes and speaks regularly in the United States, Europe, Australia, and Asia.
Books
- Breaking Away: How to Regain Control Over Our Data, Privacy, and Autonomy (Oxford University Press 2022)
- Named a Notable Privacy Book by TeachPrivacy; selected among notable privacy books between the 1960s and 2020s by Daniel Solove
- How Big-Tech Barons Smash Innovation — and How to Strike Back (HarperCollins 2022)
- Top 22 Business Books of 2022, Next Big Idea Club; Financial Times Best Books, June 2022; Runner-up, Porchlight Business Book Awards, Creativity & Innovation
- Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us from Citizen Kings to Market Servants (HarperCollins 2020)
- Publishers Weekly Top 10 forthcoming business and economics books; translated into Korean and Mandarin
- Virtual Competition: The Promise and Perils of the Algorithm-Driven Economy (Harvard University Press 2016)
- Times Higher Education Book of the Week (2017); translated into Mandarin and Russian; highlighted by Nature magazine
- Big Data and Competition Policy (Oxford University Press 2016)
- Translated into Mandarin and Russian
Global Reach
Professor Stucke serves as one of the United States’ non-governmental advisors to the International Competition Network — the only international body devoted exclusively to competition law enforcement, with members representing authorities in over 100 jurisdictions. He has been invited to discuss his research by competition and privacy authorities in Australia, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as by the European Commission, World Bank, United Nations, and OECD.
He has testified before and provided expert reports for the U.S. Congress, European Commission, World Bank, United Nations, OECD, Canada’s House of Commons, and UK House of Lords, and consulted with the White House on artificial intelligence and competition policy.
Board Service
Professor Stucke has served on the boards of the Open Markets Institute, the Academic Society for Competition Law, the Institute for Consumer Antitrust Studies, and the American Antitrust Institute, where he chaired a committee on the media industry that drafted a transition report for the incoming Obama administration.
Recognition & Awards
Professor Stucke is a Fulbright Scholar, having been awarded a grant to lecture at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing. He was a Senior Fellow at the University of Melbourne in 2012, and visited the University of Oxford in 2015 and 2017 as an Academic Visitor at its Institute of European and Comparative Law, a Fellow at its Centre for Competition Law and Policy, and a Senior Associate at Pembroke College. In 2017, he was nominated as a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation.
His scholarly work has been recognized with Antitrust Writing Awards from George Washington University and Concurrences (2016, 2020), and the Jerry S. Cohen Memorial Fund Writing Award from the American Antitrust Institute (2007).
Representative Matters
Congressional & Legislative
- Testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights on competition in housing markets (2023)
- Requested by the U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law to submit a report on potential areas of antitrust reform (2020)
International & Intergovernmental
- Invited by the OECD, World Bank, United Nations, and competition authorities across fifteen countries to present research on competition and privacy
- Commissioned by the World Bank to draft two expert reports on competition policy in the digital platform economy with Ariel Ezrachi (2019, 2022)
- Commissioned by the European Commission to draft the independent expert report Digitalisation and Its Impact on Innovation with Ariel Ezrachi (2018)
- Consulted with the United Nations on the antitrust and privacy implications of the digital platform economy (2018)
- Testimony before Canada’s House of Commons on the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook data breach (2018)
- Commissioned by the Roosevelt Institute on Antitrust’s Effective Competition Standard (2018) — cited by Senator Bernie Sanders in his Issues Paper on Corporate Accountability
- Commissioned by the UK House of Lords to draft expert report on Online Platforms and the EU Digital Single Market with Ariel Ezrachi (2015)
- Commissioned by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to report on the implications of behavioral antitrust (July 2012) (first time any intergovernmental agency considered the implications of behavioral economics on competition policy)
Merger Challenges & Regulatory Filings
- Filed comments and white paper opposing the Sprint/T-Mobile merger before the DOJ and FCC (2019)
- Filed comments opposing the Verizon/TracFone merger before the FCC (2020–2021)
- Filed comments and white paper opposing Comcast’s proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable before the DOJ and FCC
- Drafted reports on the antitrust implications of the Bayer-Monsanto merger
- United States v. L’Oreal USA, Inc., L’Oreal S.A. & Carson, Inc., 142 F. Supp. 2d 17 (D.D.C. 2000)
- United States v. Georgia-Pacific Corp., Civil Action No. 96-164 (D. Del. 1996)
- United States v. Kimberly-Clark Corp. & Scott Paper Co., Civil Action No. 3:95 CV 3055-P (N.D. Tx. 1995)
- United States v. Interstate Bakeries Corp. & Continental Baking Co., Civil Action No. 95C 4194 (N.D. Ill. 1995)
Litigation & Amicus Briefs
- Filed amicus brief on behalf of the Bar Association of the District of Columbia in NCAA v. O’Bannon, U.S. Supreme Court (2016)
- Filed amicus brief on behalf of law and economics scholars in O’Bannon v. NCAA, Ninth Circuit (2014)
- In re VisaCheck/MasterMoney Antitrust Litig. — secured the first-ever recovery by the United States as a matter of equity for its share of damages in a private class action settlement (E.D.N.Y. 2006)
- United States v. Village Voice Media LLC & NT Media LLC — led joint task force with California and Ohio AGs successfully prosecuting a market allocation agreement among the nation’s leading alternative newsweekly publishers (N.D. Oh. 2003)
- Brentwood Academy v. Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association — drafted antitrust issues for successful summary judgment motion (M.D. Tenn. 2008)
- People v. Graham — obtained reversal of criminal conviction; first time the N.Y. Appellate Division reversed in the interest of justice on improper rape trauma syndrome expert testimony (1998)
Education
Georgetown University Law Center, J.D., 1994, magna cum laude
Georgetown University, A.B., 1987
Bar Admissions
Tennessee | New York | District of Columbia (inactive)
U.S. District Court for the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York | U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth and Ninth Circuits | U.S. Supreme Court