The Sherman Act after a century

Thomas E. Kauper reviews the lasting legacy of the 103- year-old Sherman Antitrust Act. Adapted from a speech presented at the U.S. Department of Justice

FEDERAL REGULATION OF MOTOR CARRIERS

Regulations pertaining to public safety include such matters as requirements concerning drivers\u27 licenses, safety equipment, clearance lights, maximum speed limits, and others of a similar nature. It has already been pointed out that the states in the absence of federal regulation can enforce safety regulations of this kind against interstate motor carriers. It has also been shown that federal regulation in this field is desired in order to relieve interstate motor carriers from diverse and conflicting state laws. The only limitation upon the right of the federal government to impose such regulations upon interstate motor carriers is the general requirement that the regulations shall not be so unreasonable as to amount to a taking of property without due process of law. No difficult problems of constitutional power are presented. Congress has long had a free hand in regulating railroads with respect to safety equipment, safety of operation, and employees\u27 hours of service, and its power to do so has never been seriously questioned. That it possesses the power to prescribe uniform regulations of a similar kind for interstate motor carriers cannot be doubted

A Look at the Burger Court

First let me say that the title is somewhat misleading insofar as it refers to the Burger Court. The truth is we do not really have a Burger Court if by that we mean a Court with a majority composed of persons appointed by President Nixon. To date we have four such appointees and if the thought is that this group is going to vote as a bloc or represent some change in constitutional theory, it is premature to speak of it as having a dominant influence. But apart from that I think the attempt to designate the style, tone, or direction of a Court by reference to its chief justice is misleading. This is commonly done. We refer, for instance, to the Marshall Court, the Taney Court, the Waite Court, the Taft Court, and the Hughes Court. The use fo the name of the chief justice is a convenient tool to designate a given period in the history of the Supreme Court. In so far as it suggests that the chief justice is a dominant person on the bench it may or may not be accurate. Any person on the Supreme Court may in a sense have a dominant or at least a highly persuasive voice simply because of his intellectual force and not because he is chief justice. I have always supposed that the particular position occupied by Chief Justice Warren was not attributable so much to any great intellectual leadership on his part as it was to qualities of personality which commanded the respect of his colleagues and of the public generally. Chief Justice Warren was aligned in many cases with at least four other justices, constituting a majority, who did fasion a series of constitutional interpretations which we now associate with the Warren Court. It is in this sense that I shall refer to the Warren Court

The Constitutions of West Germany and the United States: A Comparative Study

The purpose of this article is to present a descriptive overall picture of the fundamental features of the system established by the Basic Law and at the same time point up significant comparisons and contrasts by reference to the Constitution. Eleven years have now elapsed since the Basic Law went into effect, and significant decisions of the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht ) noted at the appropriate points, serve to illuminate the working of the system established by it

Limited Government and Judicial Review

A Book Review of Limited Government and Judicial Review by Durga Das Bas

Cease and Desist: The History, Effect, and Scope of Clayton Act Orders of the Federal Trade Commission

A cease and desist order is not entered in a vacuum. What an order should say or require depends upon the effect which the order is to have. A substantial portion of the present study is therefore concerned with the array of effects which may result from the order\u27s entry, and with the relationship between those effects and the order itself. Not all of the detailed discussion of enforcement procedures which follows may seem directly relevant to the content of the FTC\u27s orders. There are important unresolved issues within the enforcement procedures themselves which warrant examination for their own sake and are therefore considered in detail. But in a broad sense, all aspects of the enforcement procedures bear on the ultimate question of content. If nothing else, the complexity of the enforcement procedures and the difficulty of reconciling the roles of the FTC and the judiciary emphasize the critical role played by the order itself

William W. Bishop, Jr.

A tribute to William Warner Bishop, Jr