Your Money and Your Life : The Export of U.S. Antitrust Remedies

Substantive antitrust law has spread around the world. This has been a rather amazing turn of events in our post-cold war era, with more than 100 jurisdictions now claiming some form of antitrust legislation. Even though there is no global treaty framework for antitrust (similar, for example, to the TRIPs agreement for intellectual property), there does now appear to be broad international consensus on the basic principles of competition policy.Substantive antitrust law may be one of the United States' more popular legal exports, but how does the rest of the world view two very important remedy aspects of the U.S. antitrust enforcement system, private treble-damages suits for antitrust violations and incarceration of antitrust violators? As is well known, in the United States we take your money and your life. Conventional wisdom is that other countries do not.This paper argues that not only are these two remedies in fact good exports, but that non-U.S. jurisdictions are increasingly coming to accept them, as shown in a study presented in this chapter. This trend should not be surprising because the policy arguments in their favor make good sense.The paper begins with a discussion of the history of the acceptance of these remedies in the United States. The next part presents a study focused on thirteen enforcing jurisdictions, representing a cross-section of large and small economies located in different parts of the world, examining the spread of these remedies. The paper concludes with an assessment of the wisdom of adopting the two remedies, not only in the jurisdictions covered in the study but also in other jurisdictions.A later version of this paper appears as a chapter in Competition Law and Development (D. Daniel Sokol, Thomas K. Cheng, and Ioannis Lianos, eds.) (Stanford Univ. Press 2013)