American Legal History: History of Economic Regulation
Spring term, Block E
M,T 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM
Professor Morton J. Horwitz
3 classroom credits LAW-41900A
What is the history of two ideas about enterprises that have come to dominate contemporary policy discourse - "too big to fail" and "high risk of causing systemic failure?", We will study the history of both industrial and financial regulation in order to try to answer these questions.
Topics include the history of regulatory agencies from the Inter State Commerce Act (1887) through the Federal Reserve Act (1913) through the New Deal as well as anti-trust regulation before and after the Sherman Act (1890). We will also examine the history of financial regulation before and after the establishment of the Federal Reserve System
Above all, we seek to extract from these materials the changing ideas of regulation as they developed over more than a century.