Laura Phillips-Sawyer
US History since 1865; history of capitalism; antimonopoly; politics of consumption
Women in Business History
Professor Phillips-Sawyer studies competition law and policy. Her book, American Fair Trade (Cambridge, 2018), explores how trade associations of small and independent proprietors shaped U.S. antitrust law from the 1890s through 1940. She argues that they successfully altered antitrust law in order to protect their own economic and political interests, engaged in the first law and economics movement, and ultimately helped create a blueprint for New Deal economic regulations. She received her PhD at the University of Virginia and subsequently held a post-doctoral fellowships at Brown University. She joined Harvard Business School first as the Harvard-Newcomen Fellow and then as an assistant professor in the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit. She has written HBS cases on Google in Europe, global supply chains in Vietnam, and the debt crisis in Puerto Rico. She has published several journal articles and book chapters, including a research article on the history of US antitrust law and policy. In 2020, she joined the law faculty at the University of Georgia, where she teaches Antitrust Law at the law school and international political economy at the Terry College of Business. Currently, she is working on a book project that explains the development of post-WWII US antitrust law and policy by placing it in the context of microeconomic price theory, business litigation and lobbying, and macroeconomic pressures from an increasingly globalized economy.
Recent Presentations at BHC Annual Meetings