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The Federal Antitrust Acts |
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Congress derived its power to pass the Sherman Act through its constitutional authority to regulate commerce. Therefore, the Sherman Act can only be used when the conduct in question restrains or substantially affects either interstate commerce or trade within the District of Columbia. To satisfy this jurisdictional requirement, the plaintiff must show that the conduct in question occurs during the flow of interstate commerce or has an appreciable effect on some activity that occurs during interstate commerce. The Sherman Act is divided into three sections. Section 1 delineates and prohibits specific means of anticompetitive conduct, and Section 2 deals with end results that are anticompetitive in nature.Sections 1 and 2 supplement each other in an effort to outlaw all types of anticompetitive conduct. Congress designed the supplementary relationship to prevent businesses from violating the spirit of the Act, while technically remaining within the letter of the law. Section 3 simply extends the provisions ofSection 1 to U.S. territories and the District of Columbia. Because the courts found certain activities to fall outside the scope of the Sherman Antitrust Act, Congress passed the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 to further widen its scope. For example, the Clayton Act added the following practices to the list of impermissible activities: price discrimination between different purchasers, if such discrimination tends to create a monopoly; exclusive dealing agreements; tying arrangements; and mergers and acquisitions that substantially reduce market competition. The Robinson-Patman Act of 1936 amended the Clayton Act. The amendment aimed to outlaw certain practices in which manufacturers discriminated in price between equally-situated distributers to decrease competition.
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