Rigid per se rules would prevent antitrust law from resisting future statist experiments

Evidence

For Director and Levi, a dangerous implication of the drive for certainty and the reliance on numerous per se rules to help achieve greater certainty would result in the enfeeblement of the common law foundations of antitrust law, thereby precluding the antitrust laws from weathering future possible NRA attempts. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1138

Categorization

• XREF: The NRA-as-threat framing ties to broader Mont Pèlerin anxieties about corporatist planning discussed throughout this book. — connects to: Henry Simons favored Procrustean bright-line antitrust rules over judicial discretion — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1137; Certainty-driven per se rules threatened antitrust’s common law flexibility — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1138; Rules function as rules only if they tolerate some suboptimal outcomes — Frederick Schauer, Thinking Like a Lawyer, 223

Broader Connections

• Rules function as rules only if they tolerate some suboptimal outcomes #qualifies (0.75) — Frederick Schauer, Thinking Like a Lawyer, 223