This book will be of interest to all decision-makers and analysts concerned with supply contracts. The primary focus of this study is on one particular type of supply contract, namely, the exclusive dealing contract. Its essence is the agreement by a seller (or a lessor) and/or buyer (or lessee) to transact only with the other party for the duration of the contract. This analysis attempts to discern the economic reasons why that type of supply contract was utilized in individual cases, and to aggregate the results in a systematic fashion. It covers all the federal antitrust cases involving exclusive dealing that reached the Court of Appeals level and/or the Supreme Court through 1986. For the interested reader, careful referencing and an extensive bibliography provide easy access to treatments that are more theoretically disposed.

In the Opinion of the Court, the first close examination of judicial opinions as a literary genre, looks at opinions handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals, and district courts, tracing their history, function, and place in legal literature. William Domnarski explores the connection between judges and their audience on the one hand, and judicial opinions and their functions, on the other. He also reveals the key roles played by the reporting and publication of judicial opinions in advancing distinctly American values, the dominance exercised by the best opinion writers, and the rise of the law clerk as an individual increasingly called on to write opinions. Domnarski pays special attention to Learned Hand and Oliver Wendell Holmes traditionally seen as the best practitioners of the genre, and devotes a chapter to Richard Posner, Chief Judge of the Seventh Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago, seen as carrying on the Hand-Holmes tradition.