Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Vanderbilt Law Review
Publication Date
1987
Volume
40
First Page
1277
Abstract
(Excerpt)
Antitrust violations traditionally have been viewed as statutory torts, yet tort principles of damage allocation, including contribution and claim reduction, have not been extended by analogy in the federal courts to antitrust cases. Moreover, the principle of joint and several liability, made applicable to antitrust conspirators by judicial fiat some eighty years ago, has gone largely unchallenged. While the federal antitrust laws are nearly a century old, the damage allocation debate is of recent vintage, emerging in the wake of the Electrical Equipment Cases, when the private treble damage remedy came into its own.
The recent emergence of contribution and claim reduction as issues is not surprising. Scholarly debate in the antitrust field historically has involved liability issues and did not focus seriously on remedies until the 1970s. The catalysts for the current debate are: first, the seeming anomaly of a no-contribution rule in light of the acceptance of damage allocation principles; and second, the perceived unfairness of making relatively minor actors in a conspiratorial scheme solely liable for amounts that are disproportionate to the degree of wrongdoing.
Comments
Available at: https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/vlr/vol40/iss6/2/