Brandeis’s Framework for Antitrust and Competition

Brandeis’s view of progressive governance meant that the government could improve itself and the lot of its people. The Brandeisian approach to competition has five parts; together they comprise the framework for progressive governance in the field of competition. 1. Antitrust and Social Issues. 2. Translating Social Issues Statutory Commands. 3. The Institutional Approach. 4. The Role of Competition. 5. The Spirit of Experimentation. Louis Brandeis viewed America itself as an experiment. This was not a unique metaphor, but it captured Brandeis’s philosophy of government—that America was built on a unique set of principles, that its tools of democratic governance formed the fulcrum on which those principles could be vindicated and extended, and that the work of seeking democratic and economic progress would never be done. We cannot know what Brandeis would have instructed us to do today except, perhaps, to know that he would have urged us to do better.

[Jonathan Sallet is a Benton Senior Fellow]