Opinion ID: 1312425
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Senator Reagan's Bills of 1888 and 1890

Text: As noted above, we have previously stated that the Cartwright Act was modeled after a bill that was proposed (but rejected) in the United States Senate as an alternative to what became the Sherman Act. This shorthand description of the Act's lineage was adequate for purposes of our analysis in Palsson and Cianci (16 Cal.3d 920; 40 Cal.3d 903), but for present purposes we need to analyze in greater detail the Act's ancestry. The chronology is as follows: Senator Reagan of Texas introduced a short bill to define trusts in the United States Senate in 1888, on the same day Senator Sherman of Ohio introduced his bill. (19 Cong.Rec. 7512-7513 (1888).) The Senate did not debate the subject, however, until early 1890. In the meantime, several states passed their own antitrust acts. (Davies, Trust Laws and Unfair Competition, Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of Corps. (1916) p. 9 [hereafter Davies]; Rush, Historic Origins of Anti-Trust Legislation (1953) 18 Mo.L.Rev. 215, 246; Rubin, Rethinking State Antitrust Enforcement (1974) 26 U.Fla.L.Rev. 653, 657-658, and authorities cited in fn. 22.) Of those acts, the Maine and Kansas laws were the first. (1889 Me. Acts, ch. 266 (Mar. 7, 1889); 1889 Kan. Sess. Laws, ch. 259 (Mar. 9, 1889).) The Kansas act, similar to the Maine law, made illegal all arrangements, contracts, agreements, trusts or combinations ... for various improper purposes. (Italics added.) In the next two years, most states that enacted antitrust legislation followed the Kansas-Maine scheme. (1889 Neb. Laws, ch. 69; 1889 Iowa Acts, ch. 28; 1889 Mich. Pub. Acts, No. 225; 1889 Tenn. Pub. Acts, ch. 250; 1889 N.C. Sess. Laws, ch. 374; 1889 Mo. Laws, p. 96; 1890 N.D. Laws, ch. 174; 1890 S.D. Laws, ch. 154.) During the same period, the Texas Legislature considered a number of antitrust bills, and in late March 1889, enacted a law (1889 Tex. Gen. Laws, ch. 117) modeled after Senator Reagan's 1888 Senate bill. (Cotner, James Stephen Hogg (1959) pp. 163-165 [biography of Texas Attorney General, a principal author of the 1889 Texas act]; Mathews, History, Interpretation and Enforcement of the Texas Antitrust Laws, in Southwestern Legal Foundation, Institute on Antitrust Laws and Price Regulations (1950) pp. 28-29 [hereafter Texas Antitrust Laws ].) The body of the Texas act was more detailed than the 1888 Reagan version, but it retained a significant aspect of that bill: unlike the Kansas-Maine approach, the Texas act simply declared trusts illegal, and proceeded to define trust as a  combination of capital, skill or acts ... for various specific improper purposes. (Italics added; compare 1889 Tex. Gen. Laws, ch. 117, § 1, with the 1888 Reagan bill, 19 Cong.Rec. 7512-7513 (both quoted post, fn. 14).) Accordingly, by the time the United States Senate was ready to debate its own antitrust legislation in 1890, there were two streams of state antitrust laws [3]  the Kansas-Maine format  a broadly worded law that was followed in at least nine states  and the Texas format  a more narrowly worded, specific law which at the time was followed in only one other state. [4] In March 1890, Senator Reagan introduced an amended version of his earlier bill; this second bill followed closely the words and format of the Texas act. (Compare second Reagan bill, 21 Cong.Rec. 2456 (1890), with 1889 Tex. Gen. Laws, ch. 117, § 1, both quoted post, fn. 14.) In response to Senator Sherman's criticism, Senator Reagan told the Senate: The Senator suggests that my amendment ought to undergo the revision of a committee. I may say to the Senator that much of it is copied out of a law, not a law of Congress but one of the States, which underwent very thorough and searching discussion. (21 Cong.Rec. at p. 2564.) It is plain from this chronology, and from comparison of the 1890 Reagan bill and the 1889 Texas act, that Reagan's newly proffered bill was based on the Texas act (which, as noted, itself had its roots in the first version of the Reagan bill). (See Mathews, supra, Texas Antitrust Laws, p. 28; Cotner, supra, pp. 161-167.)