In his PhD work, Nogueira Serens portrays the parallel ascent of the trade-mark law and unfair competition law (from the end of the XIX century to the mid XX century) as different paths to the same goal: to restrict competition. He also shows that, from where we stand today, several other emerging fields of law (from sanitary legislation to labor legislation, from advertising law to corporation law) could be pictured as designed to stifle competition. The review tries to put his 1250 pages of arguments in a nutshell.