Justice & Law Quote by Harold H. Greene

To compare an antitrust statute to the Bill of Rights is to deliberately inflate economics into the realm of constitutional morality. Judge Harold H. Greene isn’t just praising the Sherman Act’s utility; he’s asserting its legitimacy as a rights-bearing framework. The move is rhetorical jujitsu: it takes something many Americans treat as “just business” and recasts it as a civil-liberties question, with monopolistic power playing the role of a would-be state that can coerce, surveil, and silence through markets rather than laws.

The specific intent reads as institutional defense. Greene, best known for overseeing the breakup of AT&T, spent a career watching private concentration harden into public consequence. In that light, the Sherman Act becomes a constitutional analog: not a technocratic price-and-output tool, but a guardrail against domination. The subtext is a warning to anyone who dismisses antitrust as meddling: unchecked market power is not neutral; it reshapes what choices are even available, who gets to enter a profession, whose speech can travel, whose labor has leverage.

The context matters because Greene’s era was a hinge point. Postwar America had seen both regulated monopolies and deregulatory enthusiasm, with courts oscillating between treating antitrust as a populist weapon and as an efficiency policy. By invoking the Bill of Rights, Greene stakes out the older, more muscular tradition: competition as a civic condition, not merely an economic outcome. It’s a judge telling a country that freedom can be lost without a single law being passed.