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Section 5 In Action: Reinvigorating The Ftc Act And The Rule Of Law, Lina M. Khan
Section 5 In Action: Reinvigorating The Ftc Act And The Rule Of Law, Lina M. Khan
Faculty Scholarship
The Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 didn’t just create a new agency. It created new law for that agency to enforce. The heart of that law is Section 5, which provides that ‘unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce’ are ‘hereby declared unlawful’. In passing this law, Congress also tasked the FTC with identifying the range of methods of competition that qualify as unfair, since lawmakers recognized they could not specify them all prospectively.
This is a straightforward reading of the statute, and yet it is somewhat controversial. There is a school of thought that considers Section 5’s …