An Iconoclastic Attack on the Antitrust Community: A Review of Edwin S. Rockefeller’s The Antitrust Religion
The central thesis of Ed Rockefeller’s entertaining and provocative book, The Antitrust Religion, is that the U.S. antitrust laws do not establish “a rule of law.”1 Rather, what exists is a “religion,” premised on “a mystical collection of persistent beliefs,” designed to fill “emotional needs” to do “social justice.” It is a “moral” “crusade,” chasing what Rockefeller asserts are “imaginary evils” because of “an irrational fear of corporate consolidation.” Rockefeller equates antitrust to a “ceremonial process” akin to throwing a goat off a cliff.
Rockefeller, a one time Federal Trade Commission official, has had a long career as a corporate counselor. For over fifty years, he has chaired the BNA Antitrust and Trade Regulation Report’s Advisory Board, leading a lively quarterly discussion of the latest anti-trust law developments by prominent practitioners. From that perspective, Rockefeller says that the real beneficiaries of the “Antitrust Religion” are the “Antitrust Community,” which he derides as mostly antitrust defense lawyers who “profit[] handsomely from antitrust.” Many have taken a turn as Department of Justice or FTC enforcers. That enables them to claim “access to and insight into the minds of” the current crop of FTC and DOJ prosecutors, who “mak[e] subjective decisions,” which Rockefeller criticizes as standardless.
