The Goals of Antitrust: Welfare Trumps Choice

The evolution of U.S. Supreme Court antitrust jurisprudence over the past fifty years is well known. As one of us has written, “[f]orty years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court simply did not know what it was doing in antitrust cases.”1 The Court interpreted the Sherman2 and Clayton Acts3 to reflect a hodgepodge of social and political goals, many with an explicitly anticompetitive bent, such as protecting small traders from more efficient rivals.4 The failure of antitrust law to promote competition and further consumer welfare over this period is unsurprising and inevitable, for the courts and agencies were operating without a coherent answer to the question: “What are the goals of antitrust?” The economic revolution in antitrust that took hold in the Supreme Court in the late 1970s and the 1980s was brought on at least in part by Robert Bork’s analysis of the original understanding of the Sherman Act.5 In