Preface

• Pages: 9-11

ix

PREFACE

This handbook traces its origins to a presentation at the American

Bar Association’s 1990 annual Meeting in Chicago by Harvey I.

Saferstein, the first chairman of the Business Torts and Unfair

Competition Committee of the Section of Antitrust law.1 That

presentation, and its accompanying surveys both of antitrust practitioners

from around the country and of judicial decisions over the past thirty

years, validated a perceived trend toward the increased use of business

tort claims in addition to, and often in lieu of, “traditional” antitrust

claims.

In 1992, members of the Business Torts and Unfair Competition

Committee prepared a Working paper, entitled Tortious Interference and

Competition: A Survey of the Law in Selected States, which examined the

various interference torts, and highlighted the diverse ways in which

courts around the country grapple with, and ultimately resolve, the role

of competition policy in the field of business torts. This working paper

was followed up that year by a Spring Meeting program put on by the

Business Torts and Unfair Competition Committee, entitled “The

Emerging Role of State Court Claims in Antitrust litigation.” The panel

for that program was composed of a distinguished group of participants,

including Professor Thomas E. Kauper of the University of Michigan

Law School and a number of private practitioners with substantial

expertise in antitrust and business tort litigation. That program explored

the practical and procedural “tricks” and “traps” in litigation involving

the interplay of antitrust and business tort claims.

The first edition of this handbook, published in 1996 by the

Business Torts and Unfair Competition Committee, built upon the

Section’s prior work in this area. This second edition is a substantive

update of that prior work and is being published nearly ten years later by

the Business Torts and Civil RICO Committee, a new committee formed

as the result of the merger of the Business Torts and Unfair Competition

and Civil RICO Committees. Like the first edition, this second edition is

intended as a practical litigator’s guide for the handling of the

1. See Harvey I. Saferstein, The Ascendancy of Business Tort Claims in

Antitrust Practice, 59 Antitrust L.J. 379 (1991).