Document Type

Article

Publication Title

California Law Review

Abstract

There is, today, a battle for the soul of antitrust. On one side is the Chicago School, which asserts that the law should be derived from and explained by economics. Chicagoans believe that business has a strong tendency to produce efficiency when unconstrained by positive law. On the other side is what I call the New Coalition, which believes that law is essentially different from economics; economics is one of the tools used to carry out the spirit of the law. Members of the New Coalition believe that law can be derived from the statutory text, informed both by its legislative roots and by its evolving judicial construction. Judges Bork, Easterbrook, and Posner are widely identified with the Chicago School, and I refer to their scholarship and jurisprudence as examples of Chicago School thinking. Professor Sullivan is a member of the more diverse New Coalition, and I treat Professor Sullivan's Article as representative of the challenge to the Chicago School. I address two questions: (1) Which of the two alliances better describes the history of antitrust and the current state of the law? (2) Which better predicts the future of antitrust? It is a human tendency to interweave our vision of the way the world should be with our description of things past and our prediction of things future. We tend to see what confirms our vision, which is in turn a product of our values. Accordingly, before evaluating the descriptive or predictive work of either school, I summarize the normative orientations of each.

First Page

917

DOI

https://doi.org/10.15779/Z38QJ0B

Volume

75

Publication Date

1987

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