Schwartz, Law School Icon, Dies at 89 (continued)
By Larry Teitelbaum

Schwartz also made a mark in the anti-trust field. Here, too, he was ahead of his time. A populist and old-time liberal who believed he could make life better, Schwartz championed stringent enforcement of regulated industries – long before the era of divestiture. In the mid-1950s, President Eisenhower’s attorney general commissioned Schwartz and other legal experts to study anti-trust laws. Most committee members favored less regulation. Not Schwartz. He wrote a dissenting opinion that railed against lax regulations and monopolies.

“Antimerger measures are undermined and rendered almost absurb so long as a number of colossal enterprises remain apparently immune from the law even though they are of greater size than their combining competitors,” Schwartz wrote.

Schwartz understood business better than most law professors at the time. He attended The Wharton School and, after graduating from Penn Law School in 1935, spent several years in Washington as an attorney for the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division.

A Philadelphia native, Schwartz returned to Penn Law School in 1946, to teach Criminal Law and Government Regulation of Business. In nearly forty years at Penn, he became an icon, expressing strong opinions, lobbying deans to improve the school and, most of all, mentoring students, several of whom said Schwartz launched their careers with well-placed recommendations.

Harry First L’69, a law professor at NYU, noted that Schwartz was gracious enough to step back and let him co-author the sixth edition of his book, Antitrust and Regulatory Activities. Not only that, First said, but Schwartz wrote a letter to officials at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Anti-Trust Division that opened up doors and led to a job offer.

According to Edward Rock L’83, the Saul A. Fox Professor of Business Law at Penn, “the (Philadelphia) anti-trust bar is filled with former students of Lou Schwartz’… He was one of those grand professors who could hold forth. He had enormous force of personality. He kind of put his thumbs behind his lapels and discussed the way it was. One really did have the sense of learning from a great man.”