Khan was born in London to Pakistani parents and moved with them to the United States when she was 11 years old. She graduated from Williams College in 2010 where she wrote her thesis on Hannah Arendt. She was also the editor of the student newspaper at Williams. After graduating she went to work at the New America Foundation, where she did anti-monopoly research and writing for the Open Markets Program. She received her JD from Yale University in 2017.
''Amazon's Antitrust Paradox''
While still a law student at Yale University, she became a public figure in 2017 when her article in the Yale Law Journal, Amazon's Antitrust Paradox, made a significant impact in American legal and business circles. The New York Times described it as "reframing decades of monopoly law". In the article, Khan argued that the current American antitrust law framework, which focuses on keeping consumer prices down, cannot account for the anticompetitive effects of platform-based business models such as that of Amazon. She proposed alternative approaches for doing so: "restoring traditional antitrust and competition policy principles or applying common carrier obligations and duties."
Career
Khan researched and published on market consolidation issues at the New America Foundation until 2014, when she began law school at Yale. While at Yale, Khan was a co-student director of Yale's Mortgage Foreclosure Litigation Clinic, where she represented homeowners who were being improperly foreclosed on by financial institutions. She also spent a summer working at Gupta Wessler, a firm specializing in public interest and plaintiff-side appellate litigation. After completing her studies, Khan worked as legal director at the Open Markets Institute, which was spun off from New America after Khan and her team criticized Google's market power, prompting pressure from Google, which was a funder of New America. During her time at OMI, Khan met with Senator Elizabeth Warren to discuss anti-monopolistic policy ideas. In 2018, Khan worked as a Legal Fellow at the Federal Trade Commission in the office of Commissioner Rohit Chopra. Khan joined Columbia Law School as an academic fellow, where she pursued research and scholarship on antitrust law and competition policy, especially relating to digital platforms. She published The Separation of Platforms and Commerce in the Columbia Law Review, making the case for structural separations that prohibit dominant intermediaries from entering lines of business that place them in direct competition with the businesses dependent on their networks. In 2019, Khan began serving as counsel to the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law, where she has been leading the congressional investigation into digital markets. In July 2020, Columbia Law School Gillian Lester announced that Khan would be joining the school's faculty as an Associate Professor of Law.
Awards and recognition
For Amazon's Antitrust Paradox, Khan won the Antitrust Writing Award for "Best Academic Unilateral Conduct Article" in 2018, the Israel H. Peres Prize by Yale Law School, and the Michael Egger Prize from the Yale Law Journal. In 2018 Politico named Khan to the Politico 50, its list of thinkers whose ideas are driving politics, describing Khan as "a leader of a new school of antitrust thought." Khan has also been named to Foreign Policy's "Global Thinkers," The Prospect's "Top 50 Thinkers," the WIRED25, the National Journal 50, Washingtonian's list of most influential women, and Time's "Next Generation Leaders." Khan's scholarship has attracted significant public attention around the world. She has been profiled by the The Washington Post, Washington Monthly, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Wired, The Financial Times, Time, Manager Magazin, El País, and Le Figaro.
