Welcome back to Trace's podcast, bribed, swindle, or steel. I'm Alexandra Ragi, and today we're

discussing antitrust laws. I'm sure it seems like a very dry topic to people unfamiliar with

the history, but cartels and price fixing is actually pretty

gritty stuff. My guest is Lisa Phelan, who has just entered private practice after 25 years with

the Department of Justice, where she rose to lead the Antitrust Division's National Criminal

Enforcement Section. Among several other prestigious honors, she was awarded the Presidential Rank Award by President Obama in 2015.

She has recently joined Morrison Forrester as a partner in the Global Antitrust Law Practice and Investigations and White Collar Group.

Lisa, thank you for joining me.

Thank you, Alexandra, for inviting me.

Well, at its most basic, we'll just jump in.

We're talking about price fixing.

But how did laws around this issue develop initially?

It's really interesting, or it is to me, since I've been doing antitrust for so long.

There's sort of a famous quote in this space that it goes all the way back to Adam Smith

when he wrote the wealth of nations

in 1776. He wrote there that people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and

diversion, but that the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or in some contrivance

to raise prices. So that means I'm right around the founding of the country. People recognized and

realized that businessmen were unfortunately inclined to lean towards discussing prices and perhaps

making agreements about them. But there really wasn't anything to stop them from doing that in

terms of legal prohibitions until the late 1800s. That was sort of the

era of the robber barons, you know, the huge monopolies and really powerful executives in like

...