Robert Bork

Robert Bork (1927–2012) was an American jurist and legal scholar whose 1978 book The Antitrust Paradox became the foundational text of the Chicago School approach to antitrust law. Bork argued that the sole legitimate goal of antitrust is the maximization of consumer welfare, measured by prices and output, and that any other goal — protecting small competitors, preserving democratic values, or preventing concentrated economic power — was illegitimate protectionism in disguise. His framework transformed American antitrust from a structural safeguard against monopoly into an efficiency audit, licensing the consolidation of industries from telecommunications to agriculture to digital platforms. Before his scholarly career, Bork was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1987, but the Senate rejected his confirmation in a historically contentious vote that made his name a verb — "to bork" — meaning to obstruct a nomination through intense public opposition.

Bork's Consumer Welfare Standard was not a discovery. It was a reduction — a deliberate narrowing of antitrust's vision that converted law into economics and, in doing so, blinded itself to the political consequences of concentrated power.