IN RESTRAINT OF

Restraint of trade was a phrase of the old common law?tolerably defined as to ancillary restraints, vague and of varying content as to non-ancillary restraints. Legislated into law by a pressured and hur ried Congress of uncertain purpose its definition became the problem of the courts. As the Court has said, "The prohibitions of the Sherman Act were not stated in terms of precision or of crystal clarity and the Act itself did not define them. In consequence of the vagueness of its language, . . . the courts have been left to give con tent to the statute. . . .'n After 20 years of groping, the Supreme Court in the Standard Oil case2 concluded, in effect, that the phrase "restraint of trade" was the symbol of an economic concept incapable of fine definition. Since then the courts have considered and included within or excluded from its scope a multitude of varying factual situ ations. Combining these holdings and the voluminous dicta of the usually lengthy opinions, there has emerged a picture of this concept fairly clear in general outline, though vague and blurred in many of its details.