The Predicament of Antitrust Jurisprudence: Economics and the Monopolization of Price Discrimination Argument

Adherents to the Law and Economics Approach (LEA) claim that the incoherence of antitrust doctrine is attributable to a "policy at war with itself" and that only an unrivaled regime of efficiency can resolve this predicament. To demonstrate this rule of reason's jurisprudential impossibility as well as its ethical undesirability, Professor Peritz examines three strains of scholarship addressing price discrimination doctrine-an area already dominated by LEA argument. He finds that the LEA's success at the symbolic level only veils its substantive inadequacies. In particular, he explains why the LEA's exclusion from rational argument of the Robinson-Patman Act, antitrust's symbol of anti-efficiency, fails to provide the expected rationalization of price-discrimination argument.