The prevailing substantive antitrust rules governing verticai arrangements are anomalous in several respects. One anomaly may be that the rules reflect a political standoff likely to prove quite stable over time. If stability connotes viability, the rules of vertical restraints may be both viable and anomalous. The vertical rules have had a chaotic, an anti-intellectual, and, in some senses, a belated development. Unlike the early cases involving horizontal restraints, none of the early vertical restraints cases wrestled with economic principle and explored the implications of the then-rudimentary learning about price theory or industrial organization. Some of the earliest cases were tie-in cases such as the Button-Fastener case' and A.B. Dick. 2 In those cases, a tie appears to have been used to meter demand elasticity, or perhaps for quality control. But the permissive and sensible lines of development that started here did not survive the Motion Picture Patents case.3