One of the Congeries of Anticompetitive Practices...

Abstract

This year marks the seventy-seventh anniversary of the then unique American attempt to enforce competition legislatively and thereby rely upon private, competitive, self-serving enterprise to yield the best social result. Since those rudimentary declarations in the Sherman Act that contracts, etc., in restraint of trade are illegal, and that monopolizing, etc., is a misdemeanor, some twenty-two pieces of legislation have contained provisions. In addition there have been nineteen laws concerned with process and procedure; seven related laws; and twentythree instances of Congress providing for specific exceptions and exemptions. Further, the Staff of the House Antitrust Subcommittee shows in 196 footnotes the extent to which these laws have been amended, and in many instances that the modification was significant.l Although the enforcement of the antitrust laws has been through phases of trust-busting, recession, and revival, in recent years the interpretation of these laws has come to be particularly strong, especially in the application of the Sherman and Clayton Acts to mergers. In this area of antitrust law, where Section 7 of the Clayton Act proscribes intercorporate stock or asset acquisitions where the effect may be substantially to lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly in any line of commerce in any section of the country, recent strong anti-merger developments include the holdings that: (1) Violation may occur even though market shares are relatively small, espec-