[ameister14]

I'm not saying current political conservatives are the cause, Bork was hugely influential beyond traditional conservative circles, particularly in antitrust law.

If you read Bork's work, especially The Antitrust Paradox, and if you study the caselaw prior to and post 1970's, you'll see a stark difference.

It was really a conservative idea at that point but I'd say it's more neoliberal, which has a strong backing in the democratic party and has for decades, beginning with Carter.

The per se analysis and application, particularly, is just massively different from the pre-Bork era. He's the single largest reason that the three main elements of cost, quality, and quantity as a standard for antitrust analysis has eventually boiled down almost entirely to cost, partially because it's so much easier to measure but also because he advocated for it as a mechanism to measure business efficiency.

One of the big problems of this is the change in fundamentals since Bork was writing in the 70's, particularly with union membership declining so heavily. He was countering a very strong and powerful union system and factored that into his analysis, and we just don't have that in the private sector any longer.

I've been working on a paper for a while about theoretically adding in wage and labor market analysis into the mix, particularly with monopoly and monopsony situations, but it's kinda stalled since I've been clerking.

Honestly, read the guy's book and read some cases if you're interested. You'll see it fairly quickly.

[rayiner]

I think we basically agree. My point is that his ideas gained so much traction because neoliberalism was ascendant during this period. Law & economics started in the 1960s, and as you note, by Carter it had widely reshaped regulatory law in general.