Word: antitrust
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...wallflower at the orgy. Free-market philosophy discouraged government from interfering in corporate combinations. Capital Cities lapped up ABC. R.J. Reynolds gulped Nabisco. Under George Bush the outlook shifted a bit, but when understaffed government lawyers went to court, they mostly lost. Anne Bingaman, Bill Clinton's chief of antitrust, roared into work promising a different world. As a warning shot she got Congress to fund 61 new antitrust attorneys. At a Washington conference a few weeks ago, she gave the word once again to companies that try to corner their markets: "We are the competition agency...
...deliver. The wife of Senator Jeff Bingaman, a three-term Democrat from New Mexico, Bingaman was once a plaintiff's lawyer who could claim a record-making $1 billion judgment against a foreign uranium cartel. By the end of last year, she had initiated more than 33 civil antitrust cases, compared with an average of 10 a year for her Republican predecessors. But the legal theory of antitrust has been changing. In federal courts, where Republican-appointed judges predominate, pursuing large companies simply because they are successful is frowned upon. Rather than see an oversize market share as proof...
...moved aggressively and brought a lot of cases," says Stanford law professor William Baxter, a Reagan-era antitrust chief. "But she's going to have egg on her face if she loses a lot of them." Then again, her Microsoft case was undone by a judge who thought she moved too timidly. "We filed exactly the case that in my best professional judgment deserved to be filed," she told TIME last month. "Anyone else want to sue Microsoft...
Justice department lawyers should have known Stanley Sporkin wouldn't just rubber-stamp the Microsoft settlement. When antitrust chief Anne Bingaman urged the bearish federal judge to approve it, Sporkin growled back: "Will the government give me a pen to sign, or can I use my own? I've got to have some role here...
Three years ago, he ruled that the procedure used by the Senate to convict Federal Judge Alcee Hastings was unconstitutional. A few months later, the Supreme Court shot down his theory when it ruled in a similar case that judges had no power to oversee impeachments. Many antitrust lawyers expect his Microsoft ruling to get the same brush-off from a higher court. But if Sporkin was overreaching, he may also have been correct in his judgment that the original settlement let the computer giant off too easily. It won't be the first time he's proved that loose...