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

The Warren Court and the Antitrust Laws: of Economics, Populism, and Cynicism

No one could quarrel with the simple assertion that the so-called Warren Court has had a significant, if indeed not extraordinary, impact on the development of the antitrust laws. It could hardly have been otherwise. The fifteen years since 1953 represent virtually one-fourth of the total history of the Clayton and Federal Trade Commission Acts, and one fifth of the time which has elapsed since passage of the Sherman Act. Every Supreme Court decision under the 1950 amendments to section 7 of the Clayton Act, the so-called antimerger law, has come after the accession of Chief Justice Warren to the bench

\u3cem\u3eFTC v. Jantzen:\u3c/em\u3e Blessing, Disaster, or Tempest in a Teapot?

The court concluded that the Finality Act, by repealing the existing provisions for judicial enforcement proceedings in the courts of appeals, deprived it of jurisdiction to act upon the FTC\u27s petition. It also approved earlier decisions holding that the Finality Act procedures were not applicable to orders issued prior to the act\u27s effective date. These two rulings, in combination, indicate that there is no enforcement machinery now applicable to orders issued under the Clayton Act prior to July 23, 1959. The question remains, however, whether enforcement of the Clayton Act has really been hampered, and, if so, whether the pre- 1959 orders are of sufficient import to warrant seeking judicial reversal or legislative relief. The Commission is clearly of the belief that it has suffered a major setback. The court, on the other hand, felt that the violations which the Commission had to prove under the old procedure to obtain an enforcement order can now be used as the basis for entry by the Commission of a new order which will be automatically final and subject to immediate sanction. An analysis of the old and new procedures suggests that the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes

Rites of Passage, Rites of Spring: The Honors Convocation and Senior Day Speeches. The Rewards of Excellence

Like the new leaves on the Quadrangles trees, Honors Convocation and Senior Day demarcate the end of the Law School academic year. In speeches made on these occasions last May, Law Professor Thomas Kauper and Federal Judge Patricia M. Wald urged graduates to take the risks that excellence mandates and to live full lives both inside and outside the law. Their addresses follow in abridged form

Some Comments on Enforcement Activities of the Antitrust Division and the Division\u27s Role in Legislative Reform

Based on an address before the Antitrust Section of the New York State Bar Association at the Association\u27s annual meeting January 22, 1975, New York City. .. . [l]t has been quite a year for the [Antitrust] division. The AT&T case was filed in November. Over-all, on the enforcement front, we instituted 38 civil suits and 33 criminal actions in 1974, the highest number of criminal cases since 1962. Forty-seven of the total of 71 cases involved price-fixing in one way or another. One of those cases, United States v. Oregon State Bar Association, represents the division\u27s first attack on anticompetitive practices of the organized bar. The decision in the government\u27s favor in its case against the National Society of Professional Engineers, challenging a code of ethics provision against competitive bidding, has provided support for this effort. The statement by the district court that the contention that professional groups are somehow exempt from the antitrust laws represents a dangerous form of elitism is surely worth pondering

The Report of the Attorney General\u27s National Committee to Study the Antitrust Laws: A Retrospective

In 1955, the third year of the Eisenhower administration, the Michigan Law Review published what I believe to be the only symposium on antitrust law ever to appear in its pages. The occasion was the release in March of that year of a Report of the Attorney General\u27s National Committee to Study the Antitrust Laws,2 a nearly fourhundred- page examination of virtually all facets of federal antitrust doctrine and enforcement. The pages of the symposium led me of course to revisit the Report itself, a visit a little like seeing an old high school friend long forgotten some forty years later. For those of us who were law students in the late 1950s, the Report was an old friend. It was our antitrust hombook and many of us knew it well. With the discovery of an old friend, conversation is likely to turn, after an initial period of reminiscences, to how things have changed in the interval since parting. How have we fared, and how are things now as compared to then? These are the same questions that arise in revisiting the Report. How has it fared? What influence did it have? And how does the antitrust world it describes compare with the antitrust world of today

Anittrust: Economic Regulation or Deregulator?

Current controversy over antitrust centers on goals and methods. Chicago School economic analysts seek an antitrust policy predicated solely upon concerns of economic efficiency . Others seek to maintain a policy intended also to protect political and social values. Disagreements over methodology focus on the Chicago School\u27s primary reliance on economic price theory to determine economic efficiency

Introduction: Transnational Corporate Concentration-The Issues

Competition policy in the United States, particularly reflected in antitrust policy, in recent years has focused on corporate structure. To some, this emphasis simply reflects a belief in a close correlation between corporate structure and behavior. A single firm monopoly inevitably will restrict output and raise prices above levels that would prevail under competition conditions, distorting allocative efficiency. The behavioral pattern is a direct consequence of structure. Many believe that high corporate concentration, even short of single firm monopoly, is at least conducive to, if not a cause of, monopolistic behavior. Some also view high corporate concentration, and the aggregation of economic as well as political and social power identified with it, as a threat to democratic institutions and individual liberty. Not surprisingly, there are dissenters who view high corporate concentration in particular markets as facilitating successful collusive behavior, but of no necessary competitive consequence. The latter view focuses simply on behavior. The relationship between corporate concentration and behavior is thus not clearly understood, and is the subject of vigorous debate in the United States. Of course, this debate is directly relevant to the need for, and contours of, government policy directed toward control of concentration. Antitrust policy directed toward concentration, and particularly mergers that directly increase concentration, is at the heart of the controversy