TWENTY YEARS O F ROBINSON - PATMAN ACT LITERATURE 1936-1956 Special Reference List No. 4 Compiled by Amy R. Jennings M.S. FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION, LIBRARY WASHINGTON, D. C. CJ RB INTRODUCTION The Robinson-Patman Act now in its 20th year, has not enjoyed a peaceful existence. Almost from the beginning, the law has been the center of legal controversy and despite the development of a sizable body of case law many problems of theory and application persist. Because of the nature of the act and its wide application the library receives numerous requests for literature on the subject. In recent years the demand for this information has increased substantially. To eliminate the necessity for repeated searches for literature concerning the act when each new request is received this list was begun in the early 1950's. It was intended primarily for the use of the Federal Trade Commission Staff; for representatives of business and industry and for others using the Federal Trade Commission Library. For this reason, few copies of the original October 1956 list beyond those needed for distribution to the Commission's lawyers and economists - were made. But due to its having been inadvertently announced in certain economic and legal periodicals the demand for copies from other Government agencies, universities and colleges, law firms, industrial corporations and others was so great that it was decided to bring the list up to date at this time. The arrangement of this revision remains substantially the same as the original list but new materials published since October 1956 have been added. Because the chief purpose of the bibliography is still to assist the Commission Staff in their research we have retained the Federal Trade Commission Library call-number feature for cataloged materials, but the twentyfour page section of trade journal articles which was a part of the original list has been omitted and the separate lists of dissertations and of Congressional documents have been eliminated by integrating these materials with the books and miscellaneous publications. The There are other bibliographies of materials on the antiprice discrimination law but none of consequence since the early 1940's until in 1955 an extensive bibliography of small business literature was compiled at the University of Pittsburgh. pertinent sections of that bibliography are especially strong on pre-Robinson-Patman Act materials. The compilers of the Pittsburgh list have relied heavily on trade journal articles dating from about 1930, but they have included few, if any, as -iv |