The Packers and Stockyards Act: A History of Failure to Date

Peter Carstensen, Apr 29, 2010

Congress adopted the Packers and Stockyards Act (“PSA”) in 1921 to achieve two goals that antitrust law and state market regulation had failed to achieve.

First, Congress sought to ensure that the practices of buyers and sellers in livestock (and later poultry) markets were fair, reasonable, and transparent. This goal can best be described as market facilitating regulation. The underlying concept was to create a broadly defined standard and confer on th