1.The antitrust laws seek to control the exercise of private economic power by preventing
Monopoly, punishing cartels, and otherwise protecting competition.
2) the statute′sproponents perceived the common law to embody a perfercnce for competition and hostility toward cartels and other anticompetitive tactics.
3）Before 1890, English and American common law courts used two basic approaches to examine trade restraints. For example, an agreement by three luggage manufacturers to devide their sales territories so that each could sell his goods without competition from the others in his assigned territory was enforceable because it left the trade open to any third party.
4) Nevertheless, a review of some leading common law rulings and of the conflicting interests they sought to reconcile is useful because it illuminates a central feature of the antitrust statutes.
5) The “rule of reason,” first applied in 1771, remains the basic standards for deciding close antitrust cases.
6) Occasionally a master would seek to extend the usual term by preventing his servant from becoming a full-fledged master at his term′s end or by otherwise protecting himself from comprtition.
7) Courts approved contracts with restrictive trade covenants for the same reasons they upheld other contracts which were freely formed and supported by consideration.[自愿]And courts were not arbiters of how owners could dispose of their property.
8)As later discisions explained, the interests of the parties and the public were to be protected. The courts, therefore, inquired: for what purpose was the restraint imposed? What was the agreement′s effect?
9) As courts became more sophisticated they also asked whether the lawful objective could be obtained in some less restrictive way. Was it necessary to bind an employee′s right to his trade in order to protcet business secrets?
10) As the philosophy of laissez fair[自由放任] grew more firmly antrenched, exceptions to the rule of reason developed. Courts first suggested that the parties themselves coule best judge what was reasonable.