Laura D. Phillips

Graduate Student (ABD)

On Leave: Spring 2010, dissertation fellowship at the Hagley Museum and Library (Wilmington, DE)

Advisor: Brian Balogh

Email: ldp8h (at) virginia.edu

Fields & Specialties

Laura D. Phillips (Ph.D., History, University of Virginia, 2011) is a US historian specializing in post-Civil War political, legal, and intellectual history. Her current scholarship focuses primarily on the legal and economic development of US competition policy from the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 through the New Deal era.  

Her dissertation, “The American Fair Trade Controversy: Law and Economics in Transition, 1890-1940,” argues that the history of American capitalism cannot be explained solely as the ascendancy of corporate consolidation and the lowest-cost consumption model. Groups like the American Fair Trade League insisted that cooperative associations coupled with government oversight might provide a more equitable system for competitors and consumers alike.  Her research more generally blends legal theory, the history of economic thought, and business history to explain the emergence of various types of regulation—both seen and unseen.  

Unlike the conventional history of American capitalism, her dissertation demonstrates the persistence of producer and retailer associations that acted as regulatory intermediaries between individual firms and government agencies. The prevailing interpretation of the rise of the American administrative state holds that associative management of competition failed due to antitrust enforcement and collective action problems. Phillips argues that trade associations successfully transformed themselves from cartels to developmental associations to meet the recurring crises in American political economy—from the long depression of the late nineteenth century to the Great Depression. Moreover, popular reformers, such Louis Brandeis, capitalized on anti-monopoly sentiment and argued that economic decentralization best protected the American democratic tradition. Ultimately, the rich intellectual history of the American fair trade movement provided a timely critique of classical law and economics and helped shape the foundations of the modern American administrative state.

Currently, Dr. Phillips is a postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown University's Political Theory Project (2011-2013). In the spring of 2012, she taught a research seminar in the History Department, "U.S. Legal and Business History: Regulating the Marketplace."

Please visit her personal website -- lauradphillips.com -- for more information.