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A Traditional And Textualist Analysis Of The Goals Of Antitrust: Efficiency, Preventing Theft From Consumers, And Consumer Choice, Robert H. Lande

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article ascertains the overall purpose of the antitrust statutes in two very different ways. First, it performs a traditional analysis of the legislative history of the antitrust laws by analyzing relevant legislative debates and committee reports. Second, it undertakes a textualist or "plain meaning" analysis of the purpose of the antitrust statutes, using Justice Scalia's methodology. It does this by analyzing the meaning of key terms as they were used in contemporary dictionaries, legal treatises, common law cases, and the earliest U.s. antitrust cases, and it does this in light of the history of the relevant times.

Both approaches …