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Foreign Discovery And U.S. Antitrust Policy--The Conflict Resolving Mechanisms, Donald L. Flexner

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

A look back at the last thirty years of United States antitrust's foreign "voyages of discovery" among friendly nations reveals a picture too often resembling not so much an era of good feeling as a thirty years war. Following hard upon Judge Hand's famous formulation of the "effects" doctrine in Alcoa in 1946 the Antitrust Division conducted a series of investigations in which compulsory process was used to seek documents located in foreign nations. Prodded by what they viewed as U.S. antitrust authorities' impermissible overreaching, the affected countries began to enact defensive "blocking statutes." The passage by Canada's Ontario Province …