Abraham Lincoln once defined the proper length for a man's legs: long enough to reach the ground. Nobody has yet found such a simple way to measure the proper size for U.S. corporations. After five decades of sporadic U.S. trustbusting, the problem was still unsolved: Who could fix the boundaries beyond which corporate growth ceased to be healthy and became malignant?
Last week in Manhattan, at a forum sponsored by the Trade & Industry Law Institute, some topflight economists and lawyers tried to chart a way for the U.S. around the dilemma of bigness. Gaunt, grey Dr. Edwin G. Nourse, ex-chairman...