Laura Phillips Sawyer

Assistant Professor, Harvard Business School

Professor Sawyer studies the history of competition law and policy. Her book, American Fair Trade, 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 has written HBS cases on Google in Europe, exploring DG Comp's recent cases against Google, and global supply chains in Vietnam, and the debt crisis in Puerto Rico. Currently, she is working on a research project on U.S. antitrust law and policy in the post-WWII era.
She received her PhD at the University of Virginia and subsequently held a post-doctoral fellowship 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.

Website:

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=693127

Research Interests

US History since 1865; history of capitalism; antimonopoly; politics of consumption

Service to the BHC

Investments Committee

Board of Trustees

Program Committee

Emerging Scholars Committee