The FTC recently proposed to ban noncompete agreements, and one of the most persistent advocates for this rule is Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director at the Open Markets Institute.

Vaheesan leads Open Markets’ legal advocacy and research work, including its amicus program. Vaheesan works on a range of anti-monopoly topics, including antitrust law’s role in structuring labor markets and promoting fair competition. From 2015 to 2018, he served as a regulations counsel at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he helped develop rules on payday and title lending and debt collection practices. Before that, he worked at the American Antitrust Institute.

Vaheesan’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Harvard Law & Policy Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Yale Law Journal Forum. He has a forthcoming book titled Democracy in Power with the University of Chicago Press on the history of public and cooperative power in the United States and the lessons it offers for building a clean, publicly accountable electric industry today.