Lina Khan : Zohran Mamdani, fresh from his historic victory in New York City’s mayoral race, has announced a transition team with both expertise and reformist goals. Lina Khan, a legal expert, Columbia Law School professor, and former chair of the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), is among those who will be accompanying him. Her inclusion represents a watershed event in Mamdani’s administration, indicating a policy-driven and structurally sound approach.
Lina Khan : From antitrust reform to urban governance
Lina Khan, 36, is well-known for reshaping antitrust discourse in the internet age. She became the FTC’s youngest chairperson, serving from 2021 to 2025. During her term, she worked to reduce power concentration in technological industries and restore competition principles that were in the public’s best interests.
Khan’s academic and regulatory experience places her at the nexus of law, economics, and governance, which aligns with Mamdani’s promise of a “capable and compassionate” administration. Her appointment as co-chair of the transition team indicates a desire to include evidence-based policymaking into the city’s reform program, particularly as Mamdani grapples with the difficulty of balancing affordability and economic vitality.
Transatlantic education in law and ideas.
Khan was born in London in 1989 to a British family of Pakistani ancestry and relocated to the United States when he was 11 years old. She attended public schools in Mamaroneck, New York, before receiving a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Williams College in Massachusetts.
During her undergraduate studies, she spent a year at Exeter College in Oxford, where she became interested in political theory and completed her senior thesis on philosopher Hannah Arendt.
Khan earned her Juris Doctorate from Yale Law School in 2017. While there, she gained widespread recognition for her paper “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” which was published in the Yale Law Journal. The article questioned current interpretations of antitrust legislation and whether standard consumer-welfare frameworks could effectively address platform monopolies. The New York Times described it as “reframing decades of monopoly law,” and it has since had an impact on scholarly and policy issues.
From classroom to Capitol Hill.
Before joining the FTC, Khan worked at the Open Markets Institute, where she studied corporate concentration and its consequences for democracy and innovation. She went on to work as counsel for the United States House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law, where she assisted in leading a congressional investigation into digital platforms.
Her academic career began with a scholarship at Columbia Law School, where she became an associate professor in 2020. Her research has continued to focus on the structural aspects of competition law, such as the distinction between platforms and commerce.
Khan filed multiple complaints against Meta and Amazon while serving as the FTC. She was unsuccessful in her efforts to prevent Microsoft’s acquisition of video game company Activision-Blizzard; she prevented an attempted merger between grocery companies Kroger and Albertsons; and she implemented a ban on non-compete agreements when employees switched employment, which was later overturned in court.
Khan presented a paper titled ‘Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox’ while studying law at Yale Law School, in which she claimed that Amazon employed predatory pricing to avoid government investigation because consumers were not harmed.
Where the law meets local governance.
Khan’s decision to join Mamdani’s transition team marks a shift from national regulatory reform to city governance, highlighting the growing confluence between urban policy and digital-era economy. Khan’s knowledge provides a framework for constructing egalitarian and efficient systems, which is valuable for a mayor-elect who campaigned on free daycare, city-run grocery shops, and expanded public services.
As New York metropolis prepares for a new era of leadership, the meeting of a democratic socialist mayor and one of America’s leading legal thinkers could redefine what policy innovation looks like in the country’s largest metropolis.
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