Exclusion, Invasion and Abuse: Competition Law and its Constitutional Context

The orthodox view of antitrust, or competition, law is that it should be interpreted and enforced purely to maximise economic efficiency. This chapter argues that it is by no means so clear that the maximization of efficiency should be the sole aim of competition law, either as a matter of common-law tradition or as a matter of ‘original’ legislative intent. Moreover, such a narrow approach neglects the important social and political components and consequences of antitrust policy and adjudication. This chapter further argues that antitrust law exhibits a striking resemblance, in many ways, to constitutional law, in particular to the extent that it constitutes a social and political response, administered by courts, to three particularly problematic applications of power—the ‘exclusion, invasion and abuse’ of the title. The first section of the chapter introduces these themes. In the second section, the exclusion-invasion-abuse model is described and the implications of each broad type of rule are explored. In the third section, the historical development of modern antitrust law is traced in order to show that the ‘pure efficiency’ standard lacks any credible historical claim to particular authority or authenticity. The fourth and final section, a brief survey of competing normative accounts of antitrust law offers in order to demonstrate the extent to which a myopic focus on efficiency can occlude the underlying policy consequences of antitrust law and policy-making.