Chicago School

n.
A group of U.S. architects of the late 19th to early 20th century, including William Le Baron Jenney and Louis Sullivan, noted for their utilitarian designs and their use of steel framing as a skeleton for multistory buildings.

[From the core of the group being located at the University of Chicago.]

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Term applied today to an informal group of architects, active mainly in Chicago in the late 19th century and early 20th. The architects whose names have come to be associated with the term include Dankmar Adler, Daniel H. Burnham, William Holabird, William Le Baron Jenney, Martin Roche and, primarily, LOUIS SULLIVAN. All these architects were linked by their use of the new engineering and construction methods developing in high-rise buildings from the 1880s (sometimes described as 'Chicago construction') and by a new approach to the articulation of fa?ades. In its original use, however, as defined in 1908 by the architect and writer Thomas E. Tallmadge (1876-1940), the term was applied to the work of architects of the next generation (see

See the Abbreviations for further details.

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A group of highly influential architects, including Adler and Sullivan, Burnham and Root, William LeBaron Jenney, and their followers in Chicago in the latter part of the 19th century. The School’s central philosophy was that architectural design should be of its time rather than based on the past. This group initially applied its philosophy to both skyscrapers and homes, but its greatest and most lasting influence was in the design of skyscrapers, and its greatest achievements were in structural design. Also see Prairie School.

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This entry contains information applicable to United States law only.

Among contemporary movements in U.S. law, few have had as much influence as the Chicago school. This school of thought helped revolutionize legal thinking on economics from the 1970s to the 1980s. At the heart of its philosophy is the idea that economic efficiency should be the goal of national policy and law. This argument left its mark, in particular, in the area of antitrust, where the Chicago school swayed the U.S. Supreme Court for more than a decade. Although they received less attention in the 1990s than they had earlier, the school's leaders continued to rank among the preeminent — and more controversial — figures on the legal landscape.

The Chicago school takes its name from the University of Chicago, with which most of its core proponents were all affiliated at one time. These include Professor Ronald H. Coase, Judge Frank H. Easterbrook, Professor Richard A. Epstein, Professor Daniel R. Fischel, Judge Richard A. Posner, and Judge Ralph K. Winter, Jr. Robert H. Bork, another prominent member, was a professor at Yale. The early work of the Chicago school, produced in the 1960s, built on scholarship by Professor Aaron Director. Director's specialty had been antitrust, the area of law that addresses unfair competition in business. Antitrust has a long history, in which ideas have come and gone. Through the late 1960s, the U.S. Supreme Court took a harsh view of restraints on trade. The Court ruled that certain anticompetitive practices were " per se" illegal — so harmful to competition that they need not even be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

The Chicago school urged the Court to take another look. Scholars of the school praised economic efficiency. If they could show, for instance, that certain restraints on trade were actually a result of efficient competition, then why should these practices be considered illegal by courts? Underlying this view was the contention that markets could take care of themselves without the need for heavy regulation. It was not long before the Chicago school's ideas began to influence the Supreme Court. In 1977, the Court abandoned its reliance on per se rules in Continental T.V. v. GTE Sylvania, 433 U.S. 36, 97 S. Ct. 2549, 53 L. Ed 2d 568, and turned instead to a rule of "reason," opening a new era in antitrust law.

Throughout the 1970s, the Chicago school continued to refine its economic theory in numerous essays and treatises such as Posner's Antitrust Law (1976) and Robert H. Bork's The Antitrust Paradox (1978), both of which attacked the idea that big business is necessarily bad. The school argued that an unrestricted market, in which producers and consumers acted freely, will operate rationally and efficiently all by itself. The hands-off implications of this picture had broad significance for corporate law and national policy. Chicago school theory influenced the Reagan administration's attack on government regulation.

President Ronald Reagan appointed several Chicago school members to the federal bench: Posner in 1981 to the Seventh Circuit, Winter in 1982 to the Second Circuit, and Easterbrook in 1985 to the Seventh Circuit. Bork, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987. However, widespread protest over his views led the U.S. Senate to block his confirmation.

In the 1990s the Chicago school continued to provoke lively debate. Bork, despite resigning from the judiciary in 1988 following his failed nomination to the Supreme Court, attracted attention with publications such as his 1990 book The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law. But in the area of antitrust, at least, the heyday of the school's influence was over. For years, the Chicago school's theory had been undergoing a reevaluation, with critics questioning its faith in government nonintervention.

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