U.S. Antitrust Law and Policy in Historical Perspective
The key pieces of antitrust legislation in the United States—the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and the Clayton Act of 1914—contain broad language that has afforded the courts broad latitude in interpreting and enforcing the law. This article chronicles the judiciary’s shifting interpretations of antitrust law and policy over the past 125 years. It argues that jurists, law enforcement agencies, and private litigants have revised their approaches to antitrust to accommodate economic shocks, technological developments, and predominant economic wisdom. Over time an economic logic that prioritizes lowest consumer prices as a signal of allocative efficiency—known as the consumer welfare standard—has replaced the older political objectives of antitrust, such as protecting independent proprietors or reducing wealth transfers from consumers to producers—known as the total welfare standard. Today, however, a new group of progressive activists has again called for revamping antitrust so as to revive enforcement against dominant firms, especially in digital markets, and to refocus attention on the political effects of antitrust law and policy. This shift suggests that antitrust may remain a contested field for scholarly and popular debate.
Keywords: antitrust; trusts; restraint of trade; Merger; cartel; New Deal; Harvard school; Chicago school of law and economics; post-Chicago; Law; Competition; Policy; Vertical Integration; Horizontal Integration; Acquisition;
Citation:
Phillips Sawyer, Laura. "U.S. Antitrust Law and Policy in Historical Perspective." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 19-110, May 2019. View Details