Antitrust -- The Reach After New Weapons

Abstract

All of the sanctions in the Sherman Act-the plea in equity, the criminal action, the libel on the goods, the private suit for damages-rely directly upon litigation and the courts. In the procedure all that government or private party can do is to make complaint; it is for the judiciary to straighten out the tangled lines of the industrial pattern. The result is a dual system of control : the accusing party does no more than raise the question; its settlement is up to the courts. Such an antiphonal process of administrative initiative and litigious response makes the technology of regulation a very involved process. It is slow, clumsy, inefficient; and it is usually a moral victory, rather than an industrial corrective, which a resort to law will yield.