# Reiter v. Sonotone (1979) **Argued:** April 25, 1979 · **Decided:** June 11, 1979 · **8–0, Chief Justice Warren Burger** · 442 U.S. 330 The case that put "consumer welfare prescription" into the United States Reports — in a footnote-length aside, in an opinion that held the opposite of what the phrase is now used to mean. ## What the case was actually about Willie Mae Reiter bought a hearing aid and sued five manufacturers for price fixing, seeking treble damages under §4 of the [[Clayton Antitrust Act]], which gives a remedy to "any person who shall be injured in his business or property." The defendants argued that a retail consumer buying for personal use has no "business or property" and therefore no standing. Burger, for a unanimous Court, held that "property" carries independent meaning from "business": a consumer who pays an artificially inflated price for goods bought for personal use has suffered injury to property and may sue. In canvassing the legislative history he wrote: > "On the contrary, they suggest that Congress designed the Sherman Act as a 'consumer welfare prescription.' R. Bork, The Antitrust Paradox 66 (1978)." ## The strange career of one phrase Three things about that sentence are worth holding onto. It is a **quotation of [[Robert Bork]]**, published thirteen months earlier, not an independent finding of the Court. Bork's law review argument had made the round trip from *Journal of Law & Economics* article (1966) to book (1978) to Supreme Court doctrine (1979) in thirteen years, without a statutory change or a confirmation fight. It carries **no holding**. It is one line of legislative-history discussion in a standing case. And its actual work in *Reiter* is to **widen** antitrust — to let ordinary retail purchasers into federal court against price fixers. The phrase was subsequently deployed for a generation to *narrow* antitrust, on the theory that nothing counts as a harm unless it shows up as a higher consumer price. See [[Consumer Welfare Standard]]. ## Why it belongs in the timeline *Reiter* is the citation every later opinion reaches for when it wants to say the consumer welfare standard is what Congress intended. It is the point at which an academic argument became the thing courts were obliged to follow — the completed circuit of the [[Chicago School]]'s legal-movement strategy, and the template every subsequent movement has copied. See [[US Antitrust and Monopoly Timeline]].