Laura Phillips-Sawyer

Laura Phillips-Sawyer

Jane F. Wilson Associate Professor of Business Law

Laura Phillips-Sawyer is an expert in U.S. antitrust law and policy. Broadly, she is interested in questions of economic regulation, which intersect with legal history, economic thought, business strategy and structure, and political organization. She currently holds the Jane W. Wilson Associate Professorship in Business Law at the University of Georgia School of Law. 

Currently, she teaches Antitrust Law at the law school, along with an Antitrust Law seminar. She also teaches a course in the school’s undergraduate minor titled “Antimonopoly and American Democracy,” which was made possible by a generous grant from the Stanton Foundation. Most recently, she has taught courses on financial history in UGA’s Honors College (Crash, Panic, Run: Financial Crises in American History) and upper-level electives on international political economy in the Terry College of Business. She has also taught U.S. Business History in UGA's Franklin College History Department. She holds courtesy appointments in UGA’s Economics Department and History Department.

Previously, she was an assistant professor with the Harvard Business School in the Business, Government and International Economy Unit. Before joining the HBS faculty, she held the Harvard-Newcomen Fellowship in Business History at HBS. She also held a post-doc at Brown University's Political Theory Project, where she taught in the political science and history departments. She received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Virginia.

Her work has appeared in Business History Review, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and Capital Gains (eds. Kim Phillips-Fein and Richard John).

Her book, American Fair Trade: Proprietary Capitalism, Corporatism, and the "New Competition," 1880-1940, recently came out with Cambridge University Press (2018). Currently, she is writing two historiographical essays: one on 20th century American business culture and another on American Antitrust Policy. She is also completing an essay on the role of state corporation law in early competition policy. Next, she plans to write an article-length study of transatlantic competition policy during the interwar era.