Making sense of the antitrust state-action doctrine: Balancing political participation and economic efficiency in regulatory federalism

Federalism is a founding political principle of the US Constitution and today one of the country's leading intellectual exports. A paper seeks to contribute to the national federalism debate through a careful analysis of one matter of current policy concern: the appropriate allocation of responsibility for business regulation between the states and the national government. US courts face this issue today in their efforts to resolve the inevitable tension between federal antitrust law and state business regulation through their evolving antitrust state-action doctrine. The paper examines this doctrine in detail from the perspective of a well-articulated general theory of federalism.