The paper draws on Siegel (1984) to argue that, while paving the way for constitutionalizing the free market in Lochner v. New York (1905), the reproduction cost method that the Supreme Court established in Smyth v. Ames (1898) as the preferred technique for assessing the “fair value” of a...

Most of the current critical views on American antitrust law focus on a supposed misinterpretation by modern, welfare-driven antitrust enforcers of the true meaning of the competition principle. The paper contributes to the debate by reconstructing the principle’s historical origin. While it...

The paper examines the influence of classical economics on an important episode in the American 19th-century jurisprudence on business regulation, the Slaughterhouse Cases of 1873. Law historians know well that the dissents penned in that occasion by Supreme Court Justices Field and Bradley lay...