The Report of the Attorney General's National Committee to Study the Antitrust Laws: A Retrospective

In 1955, the third year of the Eisenhower administration, the Michigan Law Review published what I believe to be the only symposium on antitrust law ever to appear in its pages. The occasion was the release in March of that year of a Report of the Attorney General's National Committee to Study the Antitrust Laws,2 a nearly fourhundred- page examination of virtually all facets of federal antitrust doctrine and enforcement. The pages of the symposium led me of course to revisit the Report itself, a visit a little like seeing an old high school friend long forgotten some forty years later. For those of us who were law students in the late 1950s, the Report was an old friend. It was our antitrust hombook and many of us knew it well. With the discovery of an old friend, conversation is likely to turn, after an initial period of reminiscences, to how things have changed in the interval since parting. How have we fared, and how are things now as compared to then? These are the same questions that arise in revisiting the Report. How has it fared? What influence did it have? And how does the antitrust world it describes compare with the antitrust world of today?