Antitrust Law: An Economic Perspective

by Richard A. Posner

"A creative, informative, and highly readable narrative....The book consists of four sections dealing in turn with (1) the law and economics of antitrust policy; (2) the problem of colllusion; (3) the question of exclusionary practices; and (4) the difficulties of enforcement.....This is a provocative work that judiciously raises pertinent questions about our antitrust policy." - Robert J. Steamer, Perspective This searching critique of existing antitrust law also provides a blueprint for its overhaul. Richard Posner argues that the promotion of economic competition is thinly defensible rationale of antitrust law, this work demonstrates the revisions in conventional thinking about antitrust policy that are necessary if the economic purposes of that policy are to be taken seriously. Posner supports theory with fact as he summarizes the major developments in legal doctrine and in enforcement since the Sherman Act of 1890. He then examines a wide range of specific policy questions, including price fixing, mergers, concentrated industries, and others, showing in detail how the courts have erred in their analyses of business economics by their neglect of economic principles. Posner also considers how the remedies and procedures of antitrust law can be made more effective.

Genres: Law, Economics

272 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1976

About the author

Richard Posner is Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School.

Following his graduation from Harvard Law School, Judge Posner clerked for Justice William J. Brennan Jr. From 1963 to 1965, he was assistant to Commissioner Philip Elman of the Federal Trade Commission. For the next two years he was assistant to the solicitor general of the United States. Prior to going to Stanford Law School in 1968 as Associate Professor, Judge Posner served as general counsel of the President's Task Force on Communications Policy. He first came to the Law School in 1969, and was Lee and Brena Freeman Professor of Law prior to his appointment in 1981 as a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, where he presided until his retirement on September 2, 2017. He was the chief judge of the court from 1993 to 2000.

Judge Posner has written a number of books, including Economic Analysis of Law (7th ed., 2007), The Economics of Justice (1981), Law and Literature (3rd ed. 2009), The Problems of Jurisprudence (1990), Cardozo: A Study in Reputation (1990), The Essential Holmes (1992), Sex and Reason (1992), Overcoming Law (1995), The Federal Courts: Challenge and Reform (1996), Law and Legal Theory in England and America (1996), The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory (1999), Antitrust Law (2d ed. 2001), Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy (2003), Catastrophe: Risk and Response (2004), Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11 (2005), How Judges Think (2008), and A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression (2009), as well as books on the Clinton impeachment and Bush v. Gore, and many articles in legal and economic journals and book reviews in the popular press. He has taught administrative law, antitrust, economic analysis of law, history of legal thought, conflict of laws, regulated industries, law and literature, the legislative process, family law, primitive law, torts, civil procedure, evidence, health law and economics, law and science, and jurisprudence. He was the founding editor of the Journal of Legal Studies and (with Orley Ashenfelter) the American Law and Economics Review. He is an Honorary Bencher of the Inner Temple and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, and he was the President of the American Law and Economics Association from 1995 to 1996 and the honorary President of the Bentham Club of University College, London, for 1998. He has received a number of awards, including the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Award in Law from the University of Virginia in 1994, the Marshall-Wythe Medallion from the College of William and Mary in 1998, the 2003 Research Award from the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation, also in 2003 the John Sherman Award from the U.S. Department of Justice, the Learned Hand Medal for Exellence in Federal Jurisprudence from the Federal bar Council in 2005, and, also in 2005, the Thomas C. Schelling Award from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Reviews

[Jr · Rating 3 out of 5]

Richard Posner is brilliant and open-minded. He has changed his mind on a lot. I admire him for that.

But this is one area where he is sticking to a discredited approach to too great a degree, even in the updated edition. Perhaps because his own work was so pivotal.

The wildly successful effort to circumscribe what is considered in antitrust has been extremely damaging to the people of the US, and even most corporations. Consider instead "The Curse of Bigness" by Tim Wu. Listen to the recent podcast on antitrust in Capitalisn't (by U. of Chicago economics professor Luigi Zingales) and Elizabeth Warren's speech "America's Monopoly Problem".

[clamintine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Antitrust law assumes that competition inherently benefits society, yet it rarely questions how power concentration in data ownership and algorithms redefines what 'competition' truly means. Its enforcement often lags behind the rapid evolution of digital monopolies

By the time antitrust authorities intervene, digital monopolies have already reshaped consumer behavior and market infrastructure so profoundly that restoring 'competition' becomes a rhetorical rather than a practical goal.

يمكن المشكلة مش في غياب المنافسة، لكن في إننا بقينا جزء من نظام بيحوّل كل حاجة حتى حريتنا في الاختيار لمنتج قابل للقياس والبيع

[Pedro Degiovanni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent little book. It's now almost 20 years old, and many things have changed since then, but it is a delight to read. Posner goes over the main areas of antitrust law and presents, for each of them, what he thinks is the best framework to analyze the problem, plus a brief revision of how the jurisprudence has judged in that area, either correctly or incorrectly. It's at a level that I think would fit either an economist or a lawyer, offering a glimpse of how the other side thinks. Highly recommended.

[Jeffrey Cosen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Relies critically on unrealistic and empirically invalid assumptions about how people act. Once those assumptions are removed and replaced with ideas actually supported by evidence, the whole book collapses into a pool of gibberish.

[Craig Bolton]

Antitrust Law: An Economic Perspective by Richard A. Posner (1978)