Biography: Competition

Donald I Baker is a former assistant attorney general who has established a small Washington firm specialising in antitrust and competition policy issues. The firm's efforts focus on joint ventures, mergers, licensing, network disputes and international transactions. Mr Baker and his partner, W Todd Miller, represent complainants as well as targets in various government investigations and cases; and represent both plaintiffs and defendants in private antitrust cases. In recent years, Mr Baker has represented the governments of Australia, Switzerland and the United Kingdom in briefing international jurisdictional issues in several cases before the US Supreme Court and Courts of Appeals. He has also served as an expert witness on competition policy in international proceedings, intellectual property cases and other proceedings in the US and abroad.

Mr Baker is the only modern member of the career antitrust division staff to be appointed assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division. He spent nine years on the staff and as deputy assistant attorney general for regulated industries, appeals and foreign commerce before being nominated assistant attorney general by the president in 1976. Since 2007, he has been selected by the US antitrust agencies as a non-governmental adviser to the International Competition Network, working primarily on monopoly enforcement issues.

Mr Baker was educated at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University; Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge; and the Harvard Law School. Before establishing Baker & Miller, Mr Baker was professor of law at the Cornell Law School and then a Washington partner of two major law firms for 16 years.

Mr Baker is currently an adjunct professor of law at the George Washington University Law School, teaching an International Competition Law course. He has lectured broadly at other universities in the US and the UK, and written a great many articles. He is co-author of two treatises that have been regularly reissued in the new editions since the 1980s-Baker & Brandel, The Law of Electronic Funds Transfer Systems and Rowley & Baker, International Mergers-The Antitrust Process.

In 2011, Mr Baker was an initial recipient of the Lifetime Antitrust Achievement Award from the Global Competition Review.