Donald Frank Turner (March 19, 1921 – July 19, 1994) was a notable antitrust attorney, economist, legal scholar and educator who spent most of his career teaching at Harvard Law School.
He was also Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Division from 1965-68.
Turner's work in academia and in the government profoundly affected American antitrust law.
As an academic, with a Ph.D.
in economics and law degrees, Turner published influential papers applying economics to a wide variety of antitrust issues.
As the federal government's chief antitrust enforcement officer, he attempted to ground all policy on economic foundations, disregarding populist or other political components on the ground that they could not be the basis for sound policy.
He also tried to develop rules that would allow courts to apply economic principles in a way that recognized the nature of evidentiary proof and the limitations of judicial fact-finding.
in his later academic career, together with Professor Phillip Areeda he published an influential paper on predatory pricing, developing the so-called Areeda-Turner rule, as well as a multi-volume treatise summarizing all of antitrust law, as explained by economic theory.
"Few economists or lawyers have pursued as ambitiously as Donald Turner the effort to make antitrust more economically rational.