Definition
Competition, in law, refers to the simultaneous pursuit of the same object, advantage, or market by two or more parties. The term operates across several legal contexts:
1. Commercial competition. The striving of two or more businesses or individuals for the same trade, customers, or economic advantage. This is the dominant modern legal meaning and the foundation of antitrust, trade regulation, and unfair competition law. Lawful competition — even aggressive rivalry that harms a competitor's business — is generally protected and encouraged. The line between lawful competition and actionable conduct (fraud, misrepresentation, misappropriation) defines much of commercial tort law.
2. Unfair competition. A recognized legal category covering commercial conduct that crosses from permissible rivalry into tortious or statutory violation. Includes passing off, false advertising, trade dress infringement, and misappropriation of commercial advantage. Both common law and federal statutory frameworks (principally Section 43(a) of the Lanham Act) govern this category. The modifier "unfair" carries legal weight; competition alone is not actionable.
3. Scotch law: competition of creditors. The contest among creditors asserting rival claims against a debtor, each relying on different diligences (enforcement mechanisms) or securities. Priority among claimants is resolved through this competition. This is a technical Scots law usage with no direct American counterpart, though the concept informs modern priority disputes in secured transactions and bankruptcy.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The action of competing; a contest for a prize or award; the competitors in such a contest.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act of seeking, or endeavoring to gain, what another is endeavoring to gain at the same time; common strife for the same objects; rivalry, as where two or more persons are engaged in the same business and each seeking patronage.
The common and legal meanings are closely aligned at their core — both describe rivalry for the same object. The legal significance lies not in redefining the word but in determining when competition becomes legally actionable. Ordinary language treats all competition as morally neutral or positive; law draws a sharp line between competition that is protected (even if harmful to rivals) and competition that is tortious or criminal. A researcher who imports the lay assumption that harmful competition must be wrongful will misread both the case law and the historical sources.
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Common Confusion
Competition vs. unfair competition. These are not points on a spectrum — they are categorically different legal postures. Competition, standing alone, is protected conduct. A plaintiff cannot recover simply because a rival has taken their customers, undercut their prices, or entered their market. Unfair competition requires something more: deception, misappropriation, misrepresentation, or another recognized wrong. Historical sources frequently use "competition" in contexts that modern readers might assume already include wrongfulness; they do not. Anderson's Dictionary of Law addresses this indirectly by cross-referencing MONOPOLY and TRADE, Restraints — a signal that the legally significant questions involve restraints on competition, not competition itself.
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Why It Matters in Research
The term "competition" in historical legal sources almost never appears in the modern antitrust sense. American antitrust law — Sherman Act (1890), Clayton Act (1914), FTC Act (1914) — postdates most of the historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus. Researchers using Bouvier, Burrill, Black's 1st Edition, or Rapalje & Lawrence will find "competition" used either in the Scotch creditor-priority sense or in the nascent trade-rivalry sense, without the regulatory scaffolding that modern lawyers associate with the word.
Bouvier's entry (citing Thornton on the Sherman Anti-Trust Act) is the notable exception — it reflects the earliest attempt to give the term commercial legal definition as antitrust doctrine was emerging. The Thornton citation is worth noting: it signals that Bouvier was tracking statutory developments in real time, and its framing of competition as "striving for trade sought by another at the same time" reflects the Standard Dictionary's definition deliberately imported to anchor antitrust analysis. Researchers tracing the legislative history of early antitrust thought should flag this passage.
The Scotch creditor-competition usage (Black's, Burrill, Rapalje & Lawrence) is a trap for researchers unfamiliar with Scots law. When historical sources use "competition" in a procedure or priority context, they mean creditor rivalry, not market rivalry. These two usages share a word and almost nothing else.
For unfair competition specifically, the corpus path runs from common law tort doctrine through the Lanham Act's Section 43(a), which courts have expanded well beyond trademark into general false designation of origin and false advertising. Researchers tracing unfair competition claims should distinguish pre-Lanham Act common law doctrine (misappropriation, passing off) from post-1946 federal statutory claims — the standards, remedies, and plaintiffs' burdens differ substantially.
Anderson's cross-reference to MONOPOLY and TRADE, Restraints is a useful navigational pointer: in the pre-antitrust era, the legally loaded questions about competition were framed as questions about monopoly and restraint of trade, not about competition directly.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The historical sources agree on the Scotch law meaning and say little else of independent analytical value. Black's 1st and 2nd Editions, Burrill, and Rapalje & Lawrence are essentially identical on the creditor-competition definition, all citing Bell's Dictionary of the Law of Scotland. None of these entries anticipates antitrust or unfair competition doctrine as it would develop.
Bouvier's entry is the most forward-looking, explicitly tying competition to trade rivalry and the Sherman Act context through its citation to Thornton. The parenthetical from the Standard Dictionary embedded in Bouvier's text — defining competition as "contention of two or more for the same object" — was a deliberate move to ground a legal concept in common usage at a moment when courts were still working out what "restraint of competition" meant under the new federal statutes.
Black's 2nd Edition's reference to "Unfair competition in trade. See UN—" (truncated in the corpus) confirms that by the second edition, Black recognized unfair competition as a distinct legal subcategory deserving its own entry — a sign that the concept was consolidating doctrinally by the early twentieth century.
What the historical sources collectively miss: the regulatory dimension. None of the corpus dictionaries address competition policy, market definition, market power, or the structural analysis that modern antitrust law requires. Researchers looking for historical dictionary support for modern antitrust concepts will need to move beyond these sources to the treatise literature and early agency materials.
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Jurisdictional Note
Unfair competition law varies significantly between federal and state courts, and among states. Federal claims under Section 43(a) of the Lanham Act coexist with state common law and statutory unfair competition claims (California Business & Professions Code § 17200 is the most expansive example). The scope of what qualifies as "unfair" under state law can exceed federal standards considerably. Researchers should not assume that a result in federal unfair competition doctrine controls the parallel state claim.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Unfair Competition and False Advertising — 15 USC 1125(a) (The Law Mind Intellectual Property Encyclopedia, ip_76)
Unfair Competition — Common Law and Section 43(a) of the Lanham Act (The Law Mind Intellectual Property Encyclopedia, ip_100)
Intentional Torts — Property and Economic — Unfair Competition and Business Torts (The Law Mind Torts & Personal Injury Encyclopedia, torts_118)
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