Most late 19th-century US economists gave a rather cool welcome to the Sherman Act (1890), but not to the Clayton and FTC Acts (1914). A large literature has identified several explanations for this attitude, calling into play the relation between big business and competition, a non-neoclassical...

The paper deals with the famous Lochner v. New York (1905) decision from the perspective of the history of economic thought. In Lochner the Supreme Court affirmed freedom of contract as a substantive constitutional right. It is argued that, in writing for the majority, Justice Rufus W. Peckham...