# William Baxter Stanford law professor who ran the [[Antitrust Division]] from 1981 to 1983 and converted the [[Consumer Welfare Standard]] from academic argument into government policy. He announced he would bring cases only on "economically rational" grounds — meaning cases with a coherent price-and-output theory of harm. **January 8, 1982** is his legacy in a single day. He dismissed *United States v. IBM* — filed in 1969, thirteen years and roughly 104,000 pages of trial record — as "without merit," and simultaneously announced the consent decree producing the [[AT&T Breakup]]. One monopolization case abandoned, one settled with the largest structural remedy in American history. The pairing is the best available evidence that the Chicago turn was about *which* theories of harm counted, not about being uniformly permissive: AT&T's regulated-monopoly leverage into competitive markets fit Baxter's framework; IBM's alleged conduct did not. He then issued the **1982 [[Merger Guidelines]]**, which replaced four-firm concentration ratios with the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index and introduced the hypothetical-monopolist test — the analytical framework still in use in 2026, four revisions later. > Stub — fill out. See [[US Antitrust and Monopoly Timeline]].