No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
“The People's Lawyer” Revisited: Louis D. Brandeis versus the United Shoe Machinery Company
Bagaturia, Shota. 2020. Rebuilding American Economic Soft Power Through Antitrust Law.
Master's thesis, Harvard Extension School.
We examine how some early corporations used patents to control competition, thus creating monopoly or cartel positions, with super-normal profits. We thus highlight one economic rationale for the rise of the giant corporation, expanding the Chandlerian paradigm. Based on evidence from the House of Representatives', 1912 “Oldfield hearings” and three industry case studies, we demonstrate how patent pools and restrictive licensing of fundamental patents led to the stifling of innovation and to negative competition and welfare effects. Focusing on pooling and licensing agreements is particularly important, as these, unlike patents themselves, are not normally open to public scrutiny.
Despite Louis Brandeis' well-publicized opposition to the New Haven-Boston & Maine railroad merger of 1907–1909, a large number of public-spirited men, including many progressive reform leaders whom Brandeis had worked with and admired, favored the combination. They saw the merger not as a conspiracy against the public interest, but a necessary response in the public interest to a commercial crisis in Massachusetts. This examination of their reasoning and action tempers Brandeis' widely accepted assessment of the controversy.
In this examination of the beliefs of Louis Brandeis about the twentieth-century corporation, we are given a paradoxical portrait of a man strongly committed to individual liberty and fulfillment who nevertheless became an outspoken advocate of Taylorism. By tracing Brandeis's views on the law and economics of the corporation and placing them against the jurist's belief in the primacy of society's needs, the article reveals the complexities and contradictions in Brandeis's thought as he struggled to visualize an order in which the interests of individuals and society would be identical. © 1989, The President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.
The election of 1912 retains its hold on the imagination of students of American political development. Long interpreted as a conflict between tradition and modernity, Martin Sklar has recently argued that the old order had passed by 1912. In law and economy, competitive-proprietary capitalism had been eclipsed by administration. The political conflict was now over who would administer prices and investment, the corporation of the state?