Book Review: Trustbusters: Competition Authorities Speak Out

• Author: Theodore P. Kovaleff
• DOI: 10.1177/0003603X1205700309
• Published date: 01 September 2012
• Date: 01 September 2012
• Subject Matter: Book Review

TRUSTBUSTERS: COMPETITION AUTHORITIES

SPEAK OUT

David S. Evans & Frédéric Jenny, editors

Boston: Competition Policy International (2009), 432 pp., $35.00.

Reviewed by Theodore P. Kovaleff

Over roughly the last score of years the world has changed signifi-

cantly. Much has been the direct result of the fall of the Soviet Union,

which so changed national boundaries that a twenty-year-old atlas is

now a curiosity and, more importantly, which also inexorably led to

an alteration of the makeup of the global economy. Managed markets

quickly became free markets as governments, aware of the failure of

the Soviet experiment, realized that the free market was a better vehi-

cle than central planning and government enterprise to achieve eco-

nomic growth and prosperity.

As the much more famous English Parliament was not the first of

its kind (Iceland had established the Alpangi in 930), so, too, was the

Sherman Act preceded by a clause in the 1857 Mexican constitution

(first enforced in 1993!) that prohibited monopolies and an antitrust

statute in Canada that passed in 1889.1In each case, however, the pio-

neers were eclipsed, and the second- or third-place entity erected out-

standing guideposts and became the nearly universally recognized

trailblazer. In the ensuing years after the passage of the Clayton Act,

which attempted to close some loopholes in the Sherman Act, few

other nations expressed interest in the concept, and a good number

tolerated or even encouraged the antithesis of antitrust—cartels.

THE ANTITRUST BULLETIN:Vol. 55, No. 3/Fall 2010 :699

1But the authors state, “Canada lays claim to the oldest antitrust law in

the western world,” completely ignoring the antitrust portion of the Mexican

constitution treated in their book. TRUSTBUSTERS: COMPETITION POLICY AUTHORI-

TIES SPEAK OUT 8 (David S. Evans & Frédéric Jenny eds., 2009).

© 2010 by Federal Legal Publications, Inc.