William Francis Baxter, Jr. (July 13, 1929 – November 27, 1998) was a law professor at
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
. His specialty was
antitrust law.
Antitrust Law
As
Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Division of the
United States Department of Justice
The United States Department of Justice (DOJ), also known as the Justice Department, is a federal executive department of the United States government tasked with the enforcement of federal law and administration of justice in the United State ...
from 1981–1983, Baxter commanded wide public attention when in 1982 he settled a seven-year-old case against
AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile tel ...
with by far the largest breakup in the history of the
Sherman Antitrust Act
The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 (, ) is a United States antitrust law which prescribes the rule of free competition among those engaged in commerce. It was passed by Congress and is named for Senator John Sherman, its principal author.
Th ...
, splitting AT&T up into seven
regional phone companies. On that same day, he dismissed as "without merit" a seemingly endless, thirteen-year-old suit against
IBM, which had employed more than 300 lawyers and generated 2,500 depositions and 66 million pages of documents. Additionally, under his leadership, the U.S. Justice Department promulgated revised guidelines that it would use to enforce U.S. antitrust laws going forward.
Remarks of Thomas B. Leary, Former Commissioner, Federal Trade Commission, The Essential Stability of Merger Policy in the United States Prepared Remarks before Guidelines for Merger Remedies: Prospects and Principles, January 17, 2002
/ref> As part of that practice, he is the author of Baxter's Law or the Bell Doctrine.
Animal Rights
In 1974, Baxter published a widely read and influential book on the law and economics of pollution control entitled ''People or Penguins: The Case for Optimal Pollution''. This book, though aimed at a law audience, contains a philosophically sophisticated stance on the topic of animal rights
Animal rights is the philosophy according to which many or all sentient animals have moral worth that is independent of their utility for humans, and that their most basic interests—such as avoiding suffering—should be afforded the sa ...
.
Baxter maintains that non-human animals have no moral consideration on their own. Any moral consideration of animals is in relation to humans. Moral consideration is a uniquely ''human'' affair. This differs from the view that there is no essential difference between the pain of non-human animals and that of human beings (see Peter Singer
Peter Albert David Singer (born 6 July 1946) is an Australian moral philosopher, currently the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. He specialises in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a secular, ...
), and also differs from the view that the pain of animals is a morally relevant consideration, but is not morally decisive (See Bonnie Steinbock).
It is important to note that Baxter is not antipathetic toward non-human animals; in fact, he points out that many things that are in the interests of animals (and the larger environment for that matter) are in fact also in the best interests of humans as well. In this sense we have obligations to how we treat non-human animals, but the grounds is only because of the respective impact on human beings.
Baxter states that the way to measure these humans interests are in terms of a cost benefit analysis, where cost doesn't necessarily mean uniquely monetary costs.
See also
* Baxter's Law
References
1929 births
1998 deaths
American legal scholars
Critics of animal rights
Scholars of competition law
Stanford Law School faculty
United States Assistant Attorneys General for the Antitrust Division
{{US-legal-academic-bio-stub