Enterprise and American Law, 1836-1937Harvard University Press, 2009 M06 1 - 456 pages In this integration of law and economic ideas, Herbert Hovenkamp charts the evolution of the legal framework that regulated American business enterprise from the time of Andrew Jackson through the first New Deal. He reveals the interdependent relationship between economic theory and law that existed in these decades of headlong growth and examines how this relationship shaped both the modern business corporation and substantive due process. Classical economic theory--the cluster of ideas about free markets--became the guiding model for the structure and function of both private and public law. Hovenkamp explores the relationship of classical economic ideas to law in six broad areas related to enterprise in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He traces the development of the early business corporation and maps the rise of regulated industry from the first charterbased utilities to the railroads. He argues that free market political economy provided the intellectual background for constitutional theory and helped define the limits of state and federal regulation of business behavior. The book also illustrates the unique American perspective on political economy reflected in the famous doctrine of substantive due process. Finally, Hovenkamp demonstrates the influence of economic theory on labor law and gives us a reexamination of the antitrust movement, the most explicit intersection of law and economics before the New Deal. Legal, economic, and intellectual historians and political scientists will welcome these trenchant insights on an influential period in American constitutional and corporate history. |
Contents
16 | |
Politics and Public Goods | 35 |
The Corporate Personality | 41 |
Limited Liability | 48 |
Corporate Power and Its Abuse | 55 |
The Classical Theory of Federalism | 78 |
An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution | 92 |
Regulation and Incorporation | 124 |
The Wages Fund | 192 |
Market Failure and the Constitution | 198 |
Coercion and Its Meaning Antitrust and the Labor Injunction | 225 |
The Classical Theory of Competition | 267 |
The Rise of Industrial Organization | 295 |
The FixedCost Controversy | 307 |
Potential Competition | 322 |
Vertical Integration and Resale Price Maintenance | 330 |
The Railroads and the Development of Regulatory Policy | 130 |
Federalism and Rate Discrimination | 148 |
The American School of Political Economy | 182 |
Index | 436 |
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Common terms and phrases
Addyston Pipe agreement American antitrust laws argued argument assets Assn business corporation capital cartel Charles River Bridge Clark classical political economy combinations common law competitors concluded condemned constitutional contract clause contracts in restraint Cooley corporate charter corporate law corporation's created decision doctrine economic theory economists efficient example fixed costs fourteenth amendment Gilded Age Hadley Herbert Hovenkamp History Holmes Hovenkamp illegal incorporation industry Interstate Commerce intrastate investment John judges Justice labor laissez-faire legislation legislature liberty of contract limited liability manufacturing merger monopoly neoclassical nineteenth century operating poration price fixing problem production profits protection Q. J. Econ quo warranto railroad rate regulation regulatory resale price maintenance restraint of trade result retailers ruinous competition rule shareholders Sherman Act shippers Slaughter-House social statute stockholders substantive due process Supreme Court Taney tion treatise trust union United vertical integration wage-fund wages
Popular passages
Page 25 - For it is matter of public history, which this court cannot refuse to notice, that almost every bill for the incorporation of banking companies, insurance and trust companies, railroad companies, or other corporations is drawn originally by the parties who are personally interested in obtaining the charter, and that they are often passed by the legislature in the last days of its session, when, from the nature of our political institutions, the business is unavoidably transacted in a hurried manner,...