Overview
Description
Professor Sawyer’s research focuses on U.S. political economy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, concentrating on the development of competition policy and the administrative state. While the conventional history of U.S. competition policy portrays the regulatory state as weak and emphasizes American’s preference for free markets, her work demonstrates that trade associations, often composed of independent proprietors, significantly altered antitrust policies through repeat interactions with regulators at the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Commerce. While initially trade associations may have preferred private self-regulation, through the 1920s these partnerships between trade groups and federal regulators created a new category of competition in between free markets and regulated monopolies.
American Fair Trade emphasizes the efforts of trade associations, regulators, and economists to foster repeat interactions, trust, and collaboration among firms through industry-wide trade rules. Often these trade rules began with efforts at standardization of production processes and moved towards rules governing competitive practices, such as sales below cost, rebates, and tying arrangements. This impulse towards managing competitive markets did not result solely from interest group rent-seeking, but was also a product of a progressive movement in law and economics interested in “public control of business,” to quote Supreme Court Justice Harlan Fiske Stone. That first great law and economics movement dismissed fixed categories of free market competition and regulated monopolies and instead endorsed regulatory efforts that fostered partnerships between trade associations, regulatory agencies, and progressive academics. Ultimately, these efforts created a blueprint for President Franklin Roosevelt’s First New Deal economic policies.
By the late 1930s, the most radical experiments in a coordinated market economy had fallen under the Court’s ax; however, a well-developed administrative state empowered to manage competitive markets remained. Not until the rise of Chicago School law and economics, which gained preeminence in antitrust law in the 1970s, did the administrative impulses towards regulating competitive practices begin to erode. Her next book-length project explores how the history of American capitalism has been shaped by trends in legal and economic theory, emphasizing the influence of legal realists and institutional economists on interwar social and economic regulation.