Law Commons^™

#Lolnothingmatters, Chris Sagers

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Institutions matter in antitrust, at least as much as ideas. Most antitrust arguments, and especially the contretemps currently enjoying some attention in the popular press, imagine that antitrust problems are short- or medium-term matters, and that they can be corrected with local doctrinal steps. I suggest there is a deeper problem, a phenomenon more deeply inherent in the nature of competition itself. The problem will cyclically recur, so long as institutional brakes are unavailable to keep it at bay. Specifically, it seems that competitive markets are difficult to preserve without some prospective, no-fault rule to control concentration for its own …