Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2017

Abstract

In the 1890s, the Sherman Act presented a host of unknowns for patent owners and lax enforcement enabled the proliferation of trusts like the Harrow Trust embodied in the practices of National Harrow. Bement, a profligate license violator, ended up fighting the trust all the way to the Supreme Court, but the surprising outcome left an enduring impression on the interplay between antitrust and patent law. In this way, the case has been both important and forgotten over time. Given the outcome in Actavis, and the possibility for a change of personnel on the Court that may shift it further to Chief Justice Roberts’s dissenting view, perhaps the time has come for this forgotten case to be remembered for the way in which it pushed along the important patent-antitrust cases of the twentieth century.

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