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Sherman Anti Trust Act By Harold Evans

1025 Words5 Pages

The trouble with regulating private enterprise is that thrifty businessmen will always face fewer hurdles and more incentives to find loopholes in the law than government does to expand it. When hidden among the vast majority of principled entrepreneurs just doing their best to support both the economy and themselves, the line that divides employers and exploiters is nearly impossible to find. It is this such line that Harold Evans hoped to find in an article penned in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review and American Law Register, Vol. 59, No. 2, in 1910. Entitled The Supreme Court and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the article makes its case for the necessity and beneficiality of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, defines the appropriate …show more content…

As explained by Evans, monopolies were first established under European feudalism, where lords would grant the exclusive legal right to use or produce certain goods as a means of garnering loyalty, revenue, and commercial control from their subjects (Evans, pg. 62). Evans compares this practice, eventually outlawed in England due to abuse and the collective recognition that such practices not in the common interest (Evans, pg. 63). Evans uses this historical precursor to trusts to reveal the similarly negative both government- and market-based monopolies share towards competition, and by extension, the public good, echoing Section 2 of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act …show more content…

Evans argues that all possible violations of the Anti-Trust Act could be divided into one of two categories: contracts in restraints of trade, and restrictions on competition. By dividing potential cases into these groups and applying different means of measurement, Evans claims one can discern more accurately which side of the legal line each case falls. Evans surmises that, in the case of contracts in restraint of trade, “applying the common law test of reasonableness” (Evans pg. 72) stands as the best means of measuring a contract’s legal validity. This changes when considering restraints on competition, in which Evans claims the “test of extent” (Evans, pg. 72) to be the most accurate means of testing legality. Evans defends his hypothesis by applying this procedure to all the Supreme Court cases between 1890 and 1910. Excluding cases which failed to meet the requirements of the Commerce Clause, or those filed between patentee and

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