This is a draft chapter from the American Antitrust Institute's 2017 recommendations to the 45th President of the United States. It contains a brief but well-deserved defense of the benefits of private antitrust enforcement and a critique of the claims that private enforcement in the United...

This article shows that private enforcement of the U. S. antitrust laws-which usually is derided as essentially worthless-serves as a more important deterrent of anticompetitive behavior than the most esteemed antitrust program in the world, criminal enforcement by the Antitrust Division of the...

This Paper presents information about forty of the largest recent successful private antitrust cases. To do this, the paper gathers information about each case, including, inter alia, (1) the amount of money each action recovered for the victims of each alleged antitrust violation, (2) what...

The goal of this Report is to take a first step toward providing an empirical basis for assessing whether private enforcement of the antitrust laws is serving its intended purposes and is in the public interest. To do this the Report assembles, aggregates, and analyzes information about forty of...

The conventional wisdom is that private antitrust enforcement lacks any value. Indeed, skepticism of private enforcement has been so great that its critics make contradictory claims. The first major line of criticism is that private enforcement achieves too little — it does not even minimally...

Proposals to abandon the direct purchaser rule under federal antitrust law—and to allow indirect purchasers to bring claims for damages—sound as if they would enhance private antitrust enforcement. That presumably is why they have been attractive to some progressives. After all, expanding...

This is one of the first articles to demonstrate that the primary goal of antitrust is neither exclusively to enhance economic efficiency, nor to address any social or political factor. Rather, the overriding intent behind the merger laws was to prevent prices to purchasers from rising due to...

Advocates of vigorous antitrust enforcement should not fear the rise of textualism. The Sherman Act, Clayton Act and FTC Act were all enacted as a result of the progressive movement. These laws were written in large part to protect the interests of consumers against possible exploitation by...