Restructuring American Antitrust Law: Institutionalist Economics and the Antitrust Labor Immunity, 1890–1940s
https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/print-archive/restructuring-american-antitrust-law-institutionalist-economics-and-antitrust-labor
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.