ABSTRACT
This chapter describes unexplored gap in the Sherman Act's legislative history—the reticence accompanying the eleventh-hour redrafting of Senator Sherman's bill and quick passage of what amounted to an entirely new piece of legislation. It explains how the Court's literalist majority in the early antitrust cases applied a logic of competition to interpret the Sherman Act. The chapter shows how the Court's shift to a "rule of reason" in Standard Oil v. United States represented victory for the new majority's property logic. It maps the structure and dynamics of antitrust history. When Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that the Sherman Act "says nothing about competition", he represented the rule of reason's position in the early battle over the foundations of antitrust law. The Sherman Act could be read as simply restating the common law in its proscription of all direct restraints. According to Justice Holmes, the Act does not require dissolution of combinations.
