Donald Frank Turner (March 19, 1921 – July 19, 1994) was an American lawyer, economist, and legal scholar known for his expertise in United States antitrust law.
He was a professor at Harvard Law School from 1954 to 1979 and served as the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice from 1965 to 1968.
He also tried to develop rules that would allow courts to apply economic principles in a way that recognized the nature of evidentiary proof and the limitations of judicial fact-finding.
in his later academic career, together with Professor Phillip Areeda he published an influential paper on predatory pricing, developing the so-called Areeda-Turner rule, as well as a multi-volume treatise summarizing all of antitrust law, as explained by economic theory.
"[7] Together with the work of Joe Bain, the Kaysen-Turner book "ushered in the structure, conduct, performance (SCP) approach to industrial organization, with special emphasis on barriers to entry.
[8] While the so-called Chicago School under the neoclassical views of Aaron Director and his colleagues objected to antitrust enforcement based on the SPC paradigm (chiefly because they attributed a great deal of value to the presumed "efficiencies" of concentration), they nevertheless agreed with the "Harvard School" in conceiving economic actors for antitrust purposes as production entities and examined market conduct through price theory.
Turner taught at Harvard Law School from 1954 to 1965, when he was appointed Assistant Attorney General, in which capacity he headed Antitrust Division at the United States Department of Justice under President Lyndon B. Johnson.
[7] His most long-lasting influence came about by creating the position of Special Economic Assistant, which he used to lure prominent academic economists for one year stints.
"[1] In a telephone conversation on Wednesday 23 November 1966 with Attorney General Ramsey Clark, President Johnson stated his lack of confidence in Donald Turner.
[25] In academic writings Turner tackled problems such as under what circumstances "tying" services could be a monopolization offense, how courts could distinguish "agreement" among competitors (under Section 1 of the Sherman Act) from responses to market forces, and under what circumstances the Clayton Act prohibited so-called "conglomerate Mergers" (i.e. mergers of companies not directly competing (horizontal) or in a chain of supply or distribution (vertical)).
[12] "He believed that competition, efficiency, and innovation should be the lodestars of antitrust policy, and that forestalling the undue exercise of market power should be its goal.
"[7] In his first speech as Assistant Attorney General, he said: ""I do not believe it is proper under the law as it now is for the Department to attack mergers or other business conduct on the basis of considerations that have little or nothing to do with competition in the economic sense.
"[2] After his return to Harvard from government he teamed with Professor Areeda to author an important contribution to the jurisprudence of "attempt to monopolize" by predatory pricing under Section 2 of the Sherman Act.
By this measure, a court can determine when a monopolist is deliberately setting a price which does not profit-maximizing (except for the profits to be achieved once a competitor is forced from the market).