252
Stevens, J., dissenting
The element of competitive injury as defined in the Robinson-Patman Act is broader still.13 See S. Rep. No. 1502, 74th Cong., 2d Sess., 4 (1936) (Act substantially broadens similar clause of Clayton Act).14 The Robinson-Patman Act was designed to reach discriminations "in their incipiency, before the harm to competition is effected. It is enough that they 'may' have the prescribed effect." Corn Products Refining Co. v. FTC, 324 U. S. 726, 738 (1945) (internal quotation marks omitted). Or, as the Report of the Senate Judiciary Committee on the proposed Act explained, "to catch the weed in the seed will keep it from coming to flower." S. Rep. No. 1502, at 4.
Accordingly, our leading case concerning discriminatory volume rebates described the scope of the Act as follows:
13 See text of statute, n. 1, supra.
14 One of the purposes of broadening the Clayton Act's competitive injury language in the Robinson-Patman Act was to provide more effective protection against predatory price cutting. As the Attorney General's National Committee to Study the Antitrust Laws explained in its 1955 report:
"In some circumstances, to be sure, injury to even a single competitor should bring the Act into play. Predatory price cutting designed to eliminate a smaller business rival, for example, is a practice which inevitably frustrates competition by excluding competitors from the market or deliberately impairing their competitive strength. The invalidation of such deliberate price slashes for the purpose of destroying even a single competitor, moreover, accords distinct recognition to the narrower tests of 'injury' added to the price discrimination provisions of the Clayton Act through the 1936 Robinson-Patman amendments. The discrimination provisions in the original Clayton Act were feared by the legislators as inadequate to check the victimization of individual businessmen by predatory price cuts that nevertheless created no general impairment of competitive conditions in a wider market. To reach such destructive price cuts endangering the survival of smaller rivals of a powerful seller was an express objective of the liberalizing amendments in the 'injury' clause of the Robinson-Patman Act." Report of the Attorney General's National Committee to Study the Antitrust Laws 165-166 (1955) (footnotes omitted).
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