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Criminal Enforcement Of Section 2 Of The Sherman Act: An Empirical Assessment, Daniel A. Crane

Law & Economics Working Papers

The Biden Justice Department has announced that it may begin to bring criminal monopolization cases under Section 2 of the Sherman Act, a practice that the Department has not employed in almost half a century. The Department's leadership has justified this idea by asserting that it used to be common practice for the Antitrust Division to bring such cases. This Article presents the findings of an empirical study of all of the Justice Department's antitrust case filings. It finds that the Justice Depart brought 175 criminal monopolization cases between 1903 and 1977, but that only 20 of these involved unilateral …