The Ways of the Law

As the result of 26 days of testimony, 240 exhibits, 750,000 words and God knows what expenditure of money, effort and human talent, two great U.S. companies and a group of their top officers were last week acquitted of criminal conspiracy. Thus was played out another tragicomedy of the U.S. antitrust laws.

E. I. du Pont de Nemours Co., Inc., long a favorite target for trust busters, had been indicted nine times in the last three years on antitrust charges. It has been widely pictured as a participant in international cartels ranging from titanium to dyestuffs. Last week's acquittal in Newark's Federal Court cleared the company (along with its board chairman Lammot du

Pont), Philadelphia's Roehm & Haas Co., and seven other officials of the two companies, of conspiring with Britain's Imperial Chemicals Industries, Ltd., and Germany's I. G. Farbenindustrie Akt., and Roehm & Haas, G.m.b.H., of Darmstadt, Germany, to operate a worldwide cartel in acrylic resins (Plexiglas, Lucite), used as windshields on airplanes, etc. They were accused of controlling the production, sale and price of these plastics and of dividing up the world markets.

The Government cited as an example of price setting that the plastic, when sold in large quantities for Plexiglas, cost 85-c- a lb.; when sold in small quantities to dentists for dentures, the price was $45 a lb. Defense attorneys answered: the agreements had been made to protect the products and patents, a perfectly legal procedure under U.S. patent laws; at times the operations appeared to assume the aspects of monopoly, but there was no conspiracy in it.

Paradoxical cause of all such argument is that patents are legalized monopolies, issued and protected under one federal law, while another federal law makes the use of those monopolies a crime if undertaken with intent to restrain trade. Conscious criminal intent is not found among respectable businessmen, and even where it occurs is impossible to prove.

Having played out this sorry and expensive farce in Newark, the federal antitrust attorneys now have the facts about plastics. Their probable next step will be to start a civil suit. A typical upshot would then be an amicable consent decree, with the defendants promising to discontinue certain pricing practices that appear unjustified.

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