Volume 90.2
March
2023

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Volume 90.2
Restructuring American Antitrust Law: Institutionalist Economics and the Antitrust Labor Immunity, 1890–1940s
Laura Phillips-Sawyer
Associate Professor, University of Georgia School of Law.

The author would like to thank Brian Balogh, Daniel Ernst, Herbert Hovenkamp, William Novak, Logan E. Sawyer, the conveners and participants at the University of Chicago’s “Law and Labor Market Power” Symposium, especially Eric Posner, Caroline Veniero, Bryan Gray, and Ariana Vaisey, and the participants at the Policy History Conference (2022), especially Gerald Berk, Richard R. John, Matthew Stoller, and Barry Lynn. The author is grateful for research assistance from Catherine Freeman and David Hauser.

Labor unions and their leaders were cast as the perennial antitrust defendants for the first fifty years of federal antitrust law, and this historic imbalance fostered a movement in economic scholarship and labor activism to restructure American antitrust law. The progressive liberal-institutionalist movement in economics played an important role in legitimizing trade unions by recasting them, not as anticompetitive cartels, but rather as a necessary corollary to the growing market power of industrial firms.

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Volume 90.2
Quasi Tripartism: Limits of Co-Regulation and Sectoral Bargaining in the United States
César F. Rosado Marzán
Edward L. Carmody Professor of Law, University of Iowa College of Law.

The author thanks Andrew Elmore, Cynthia Estlund, Nathan Ford, Elisabeth D. Hoeper, and Julian Plaza for constructive criticism, editorial advice, and research assistance. He is also grateful for questions and comments made to drafts of this Essay presented at the Iowa College of Law Faculty Workshop, the 2022 Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics Annual Meeting in Amsterdam, the 2022 Global Meeting on Law and Society in Lisbon, the 2022 American Sociological Association’s Section of Labor Movements Mini-Conference in Los Angeles, and the 2022 University of Chicago Law Review Symposium. Interview data was collected by the author after receiving full authorization from the Institutional Review Board. Errors and omissions remain the responsibility of the author. Email: cesar-rosadomarzan@uiowa.edu.

Disproportionate employer power is at least partly responsible for the sharp increase in economic inequality in the United States, which threatens the fabric of the Republic. Workplace law reform could provide workers with an institutional source of power that countervails employer power and compresses inequality.

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