Laura Phillips-Sawyer, University of Georgia School of Law, has posted two papers. The first is Restructuring American Antitrust Law: Institutionalist Economics and the Antitrust Labor Immunity, 1890-1940s, which appeared last year in the University of Chicago Law Review:
Labor unions and their leaders were cast as the perennial antitrust defendants for the first fifty years of federal antitrust law, and this historic imbalance fostered a movement in economic scholarship and labor activism to restructure American antitrust law. The progressive liberal-institutionalist movement in economics played an important role in legitimizing trade unions by recasting them, not as anticompetitive cartels, but rather as a necessary corollary to the growing market power of industrial firms. Louis Brandeis, the litigator and future jurist, drew from institutionalists’ work to support antitrust reform. He argued that antitrust law was not necessarily anathema to the interest of labor organizations, and he advocated for both the application of the rule of reason to labor association activities and the revision of antitrust laws to exempt certain labor activities. The Clayton Act of 1914 created such an antitrust labor exemption, but as soon as union activity spilled over into interstate commerce the Supreme Court insisted on antitrust liability and applied it categorically against laborers. Even after the passage of additional labor exemptions in the 1930s, the reigning Commerce Clause doctrine rendered labor’s immunity from antitrust liability uncertain. This lingering uncertainty was exacerbated by a fracturing within the progressive liberal movement as some economic institutionalists, schooled in the legal realist tradition, revived the Department of Justice’s antitrust prosecutions in the late 1930s. Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold led this renewed antitrust agenda; armed with a more expansive interpretation of federal commerce power, he targeted labor groups in several headline-grabbing cases, enraging his former allies on the Left. Arnold, however, seemed to represent a divergent institutionalism that embraced both the Brandeisian distaste for economic concentration and the Keynesian macroeconomic policies of mass consumption. Ultimately, in 1941, an uneasy settlement was reached in United States v. Hutcheson, where the Supreme Court authorized a non-statutory labor exemption for secondary boycotts. The ruling helped establish guardrails for lawful labor union activities; however, it did not resolve this division on the progressive Left, and laborers continued to seek protective legislation and statutory immunities. Recasting antitrust law’s bias against laborers as historically contingent demonstrates the moments of possibility to reconcile this historic imbalance, and it implicitly argues that the progressive law and economics movement provided necessary groundwork but also required interest group organization and statutory interventions.
Thurman W. Arnold (LC)
The second is Jurisdiction Beyond Our Borders: United States v. Alcoa and the Extraterritorial Reach of American Antitrust, 1909-1945:
In 1945 Judge Learned Hand wrote one of the most influential opinions in modern antitrust law. In declaring that the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) had illegally monopolized the industry for virgin aluminum and had participated in an illegal international cartel, Hand both revived and extended American antitrust law. The ruling is famous for several reasons: It narrowly defined the relevant market in favor of the government; it expanded the category of impermissible dominant firm conduct; it interpreted congressional intent as protecting an egalitarian business environment; and it established the extraterritorial reach of US antitrust laws. Although each of those contributions has incited legal commentary and critique, Hand’s decision to redraw the territorial application of US antitrust has remained largely unexamined. This essay offers a historical explanation for the origins of antitrust extraterritoriality and advances two arguments: First, before and during the interwar years, the antitrust doctrine of strict territoriality had been eroded through a series of distinguishing cases and contradictory congressional policies. Second, the well-documented connection between European fascism and cartelization provided strong external pressures to extend American antitrust law and policy abroad and to redouble anticartel and antimonopoly provisions at home. Thus, both internal and external pressures culminated in the Alcoa case, which signaled a new era in American antitrust law—renewing both anticartel and anti-monopolization policy while at the same time linking market competition to the protection of American territorial and popular sovereignty. By 1945 extraterritorial antitrust emerged as an acceptable means of governance to curtail international cartel behavior, discipline monopolies at home, and impose an American-led liberal—and hegemonic—internationalism on its trade partners.--Dan Ernst
