Washington Consumer Protection Act—Enforcement Provisions and Policies

With the enactment of the Washington Consumer Protection Act, the Washington attorney will be meeting for the first time a comprehensive "antitrust" act designed to operate on the local or "intra-state" level. Because this act is, for the most part, unprecedented in this state, and because it involves, in addition to most of the complexities of federal antitrust law, a few novel features of its own, some sort of introduction to its provisions might be helpful to members of the Washington bar. There appears elsewhere in this issue an examination of the substantive provisions of this new law; my observations will be narrower in scope, and will deal mainly with the enforcement provisions. More particularly, I wish to outline the legal "tools" which can be used to enforce the act, some of the policy decisions which were made in fashioning these tools, and the policies—or, perhaps less pretentiously and more accurately—the attitudes, which are likely to guide my administration of this act and my use of these tools.