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Antitrust Policy: A Century Of Economic And Legal Thinking, William E. Kovacic, Carl Shapiro

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Passage of the Sherman Act in the United States in 1890 set the stage for a century of jurisprudence regarding monopoly, cartels, and oligopoly. Among American statutes that regulate commerce, the Sherman Act is unequaled in its generality. The Act outlawed every contract, combination or conspiracy in restraint of trade and monopolization and treated violations as crimes. By these open-ended commands, Congress gave federal judges extraordinary power to draw lines between acceptable cooperation and illegal collusion, between vigorous competition and unlawful monopolization.

By enlisting the courts to elaborate the Sherman Act's broad commands, Congress gave economists a singular opportunity to …