UNTIL recent years, the treble-damages provision of the federal antitrust arsenal went almost unchallenged. There were some early critics, Thurman Arnold being the most distinguished, but they were few. The literature and commentary of antitrust during the decades of the nineteenforties, fifties, and sixties contain numerous criticisms of the state of antitrust. But this literature was directed to the merits of either a particular case or a particular business practice. To the extent the authors discussed penalties, they complained about the low fines, the infrequency of imprisonment, and the lack of dissolution, divorcement, and divestiture. That the treble-damages multiple needed changing (up or down) or that private enforcement itself might have drawbacks was rarely discussed. Beginning in the nineteen-seventies, this assessment of private trebledamages actions underwent a notable change. From the scholarly literature analyzing antitrust to congressional debates on the subject, the interest in penalties and remedies has grown and has continued to grow in this decade. Moreover, the tenor of this literature with regard to trebledamages actions has been almost uniformly critical. Richard Posner has written that the "burgeoning of the private antitrust action has induced enormous, and I think justified, concern about the overexpansion of the antitrust laws and their increasing use to retard rather than promote competition."1 Michael Spence was quoted recently as saying that with the Antitrust Division's enforcement, "you generally end up with sensible decisions. But official policy is not the whole story. I