Despite a robust antitrust agenda by the federal government since the turn of the 20th Century, businesses only sparingly sued each other using the Sherman or Clayton Act. But in the 1950s, hundreds of private litigants lined up throughout courtrooms across the United States to take on their competitors. Though some saw the lawyers as opportunistic, the Department of Justice encouraged the suits as “more flexible and less authoritarian than enforcement by a central government agency.” Most curiously, a huge percentage of these were suing the movie studios that made up Hollywood.
This paper traces the growth of private plaintiff antitrust lawyers in the 1940s and 1950s and the expansion of antitrust litigation used by small businesses. In doing so, I explain this as a means of judicial and financial access in the tumultuous years for the American economy following World War II. I narrate how two important suits, Bigelow v. RKO (1946) and United States v. Paramount (1948), paved the way for a particular boon in antitrust cases by theater owners and independent producers against major studios. I then turn to look at the private plaintiff lawyers and characterizations made about their ethics against the backdrop of other expansions of the legal profession—by government officials, legal scholars, and business owners—to understand how these reshaped views of antitrust law’s purpose.
This article thus challenges traditional antitrust history by avoiding top players and economic thinking and instead centering how small businesses navigated this new legal procedure. I also highlight the social make-up of the lawyers engineering these cases and the class dynamics of these lawsuits. In doing so, I argue that the later “reformers” of antitrust in the 1960s were not just responding to economic issues and theories, but what had become legitimate threats to how big business operated.