Donald F. Turner

Donald Frank Turner (March 19, 1921 – July 19, 1994) was an American lawyer, economist, and legal scholar known for his expertise in United States antitrust law. He was a professor at Harvard Law School from 1954 to 1979 and served as the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice from 1965 to 1968.

Turner's work in academia and in the government profoundly affected American antitrust law. Turner held a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and a Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School, and he 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.