Book review

Chicago, Post-Chicago, and Neo-Chicago

Daniel A. Crane

Professor of Law, University of Michigan

In light of the subject of this Review, it is perhaps relevant to disclose that the author received his JD at the University of Chicago and wrote this Review while a visiting professor at the University of Chicago. I am grateful to Jonathan Baker, Eleanor Fox, and Josh Wright for helpful comments. All errors are my own.

How the Chicago School Overshot the Mark: The Effect of Conservative Economic Analysis on U.S. Antitrust. Edited by Robert Pitofsky. Oxford, 2008. Pp xiv, 309.

Of all of Chicago’s law and economics conquests, antitrust was the most complete and resounding victory. Chicago, of course, is a synecdoche for ideological currents that swept through and from Hyde Park beginning in the 1950s and reached their peak in the 1970s and 1980s. From early roots in antitrust and economic regulation, the Chicago School branched outward, first to adjacent fields like securities regulation, corporate law, property, and contracts, and eventually to more distant horizons like sexuality and family law. Predictably, the Chicago School exerted its greatest influence in fields closely tied to commercial regulation. But never did Chicago trounce its ideological opponents as plainly and lastingly as it did in the field of its early conquests—antitrust.

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