Texas antitrust law: formulation and enforcement, 1889-1903

Abstract

This paper examines the early years of antitrust law in Texas, from the multiple antitrust acts passed by the state legislature between 1889 and 1903 to the difficulties encountered by state prosecutors in antitrust enforcement efforts during that time. Texas reformers, hoping that laws prohibiting trusts would solve a host of economic problems, continued to strengthen and improve the antitrust laws in their first fifteen years of operation. A thorough study of the Texas legislative record and precedent-setting antitrust cases reveals the controversy generated by the antitrust laws, and how that controversy was affected by changes in the national economy, American legal theory, and federal state policy. Texas antitrust law is then situated within a wider context of coincident nationwide regulatory efforts as regulation transitioned from a state matter to a federal one while also evolving away from antitrust and toward bureaucracy.