Ward S. Bowman, Ford Foundation Professor of Law and Economics, 1956-77

Ward S. Bowman

REFERENCES:

Fred R. Shapiro, “The Most-Cited Articles from The Yale Law Journal,” 100 Yale L. J. 1449 (1991).

Ward Simon Bowman (1911-92) was an economist recruited to the Law School by Dean Rostow during his expansion of the faculty in the late 1950s.  Bowman’s innovative work was an early exemplar of the use of price theory to analyze legal problems, an approach often referred to as the Chicago “School” of Law and Economics.

Bowman’s best-known work was in the field of antitrust, and its intersection with intellectual property law. His article, “Tying Arrangements and the Leverage Problem,” 67 Yale L. J. 19 (1957), is among the most cited articles in the history of the Yale Law Journal. The article anticipated the work of Robert Bork and others, contending that monopolists would generally be unable to “leverage” a monopoly through product-tying. 

In 1973, Bowman published a path-breaking book, Patent & Antitrust Law: A Legal & Economic Appraisal. The book was a sustained critique of existing doctrine. For example, Bowman contended that “[t]he development of the law with respect to tying practice has been a one-way street. Its signpost was misdirected by Justice White in Motion Picture Patents in 1917. His leveraging fallacy was received as gospel. Were it true, as succeeding justices assumed, much of the subsequent law would have been unobjectionable. But by parlaying a leverage fallacy with an unproved, incipient monopoly hypothesis (arising from an assumed identity between effect on competitors and effect on competition) the Court has since 1917 consistently applied faulty economics leading to the wrong answers to the questions it has asked.” Patent & Antitrust Law, at 182. Moreover, at the time Bowman was writing, patent and antitrust had conventionally been viewed as pursuing opposing goals—one promoting competition and the other promoting monopoly. A central insight in the book was that patent and antitrust law had a single, common goal—“to maximize wealth by producing what consumers want at the lowest cost,” Patent & Antitrust Law, at 1.