text: Antitrust law Violations of antitrust law are typically resolved through consent decrees, which began to be more widely used after 1914 with the enactment of the Clayton Antitrust Act. This act began to address the complexities of antitrust economic regulation by recognizing the use of consent decrees as a method for the enforcement of federal antitrust legislation. In amending the antitrust statutes laid out in the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) and its supplement, the Clayton Antitrust Act (1914), the Tunney Act further specified how consent decrees could be used by establishing that the courts must demonstrate that consent decrees serve the "public interest" in antitrust cases filed by the Justice Department. In regard to antitrust decrees, the first consent decree used in antitrust regulation under the Sherman Antitrust Act was Swift & Co. v. United States in which the Court used its power under the Commerce Clause to regulate the Chicago meat trust as an unlawful economic monopoly. In Standard Oil Company of New Jersey v. United States, the government used consent decrees to dissolve the horizontal monopoly that John D. Rockefeller had established. Other examples of antitrust consent decrees can be found in a wide range of areas, including their involvement in corporations specializing in technology, the film industry, and the motor vehicle industry.
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