The Antitrust Religion

Many successful American businesses have been accused of anti-competitive practices. Drawing on 50 years of experience with U.S. antitrust laws, attorney and author Edwin S. Rockefeller sheds light on why lawmakers, bureaucrats, academics, and journalists use arbitrary and irrational laws and enforcement mechanisms to punish capitalists rather than promote competition. The Antitrust Religion argues that everything most people know about antitrust is wrong. Rockefeller vividly shows how antitrust has been transformed into a quasi-religious faith. He explains that this “antitrust religion” relies on economic theories that bestow a veneer of objectivity and credibility on law enforcement practices that actually rely on hunch and whim. This book will greatly assist business professionals, journalists, policymakers, professors, judges, and all others interested in government regulation of business in understanding how our antitrust laws actually work.

Leniency policies are seen as a revolution in contemporary anti-cartel law enforcement. Unique to competition law, these policies are regarded as essential to detecting, punishing and deterring business collusion – conduct that subverts competition at national and global levels. Featuring contributions from leading scholars, practitioners and enforcers from around the world, this book probes the almost universal adoption and zealous defence of leniency policies by many competition authorities and others. It charts the origins of and impetuses for the leniency movement, captures key insights from academic research and practical experience relating to the operation and effectiveness of leniency policies and examines leniency from the perspectives of corporate and individual applicants, advisers and authorities. The book also explores debates surrounding the intersections between leniency and other crucial elements of the enforcement system such as compensation, compliance and criminalisation. The rich critical analysis in the book draws on the disciplines of law, regulation, economics and criminology. It makes a substantial and distinctive contribution to the literature on a topic that is highly significant to a wide range of actors in the field of competition law and business regulation generally. From the Foreword by Professor Frédéric Jenny ' ... fundamental questions are raised and thoroughly discussed in this book which is undoubtedly the most comprehensive scholarly work on leniency policies produced so far ... [the] book should be required reading for all seeking to acquire a deeper insight into the issues related to leniency policy. It is a priceless contribution ... '

This volume explores the promise and limitations of competitive market dynamics, looking at the threats to competition - cartels, agreements, monopolies, and mergers - and the laws in place across the US and European Union to safeguard the process of competition.

In 2012, when the Justice Department sued Apple and five book publishers for price fixing, many observers sided with the defendants. It was a reminder that, in practice, Americans are ambivalent about competition. Chris Sagers shows why protecting price competition, even when it hurts some of us, is crucial if antitrust law is to preserve markets.

"This is a book for people who practice antitrust law and for people who want to learn antitrust. For practitioners, the book supplements a treatise. For students, the book complements a casebook. It goes beyond what courts have said and done to probe the ethos, logos, and pathos of antitrust; it present the foundations of antitrust in law, history, and economics. This also could be a book for people who take an interest in antitrust policy. Antitrust law was a populist impulse. After a century during which antitrust has grown ever more technocratic, antitrust is again a matter of public interest"--

"This book examines competition law on the global level and reveals its often complex and little-understood dynamics. It focuses on the interactions between national and international legal regimes that are central to these dynamics and a key to understanding them." --Book Jacket.

A fresh descriptive and normative perspective on law and religion supported by comparative case studies of Greater China.

America’s founders thought the right to earn a living was so basic and obvious that it didn’t need to be mentioned in the Bill of Rights. The Right to Earn a Living charts the history of this fundamental human right, from the constitutional system that was designed to protect it by limiting government’s powers, to the Civil War Amendments that expanded protection to all Americans, regardless of race.