They didn’t see it coming.

When franchising burst on the American economic scene with such force and vitality in the 1950’s and 1960’s, no franchise-specific laws, rules or regulations were there to greet it. To the contrary, for many years only those bodies of law governing business in general regulated franchisors and their networks—chief among them, given franchising’s structural features, our nation’s corporate, intellectual property and antitrust laws.