European Law Commons^™

The Global Dominance Of European Competition Law Over American Antitrust Law, Anu Bradford, Adam S. Chilton, Katerina Linos, Alex Weaver

Faculty Scholarship

The world’s biggest consumer markets – the European Union and the United States – have adopted different approaches to regulating competition. This has not only put the EU and US at odds in high-profile investigations of anticompetitive conduct, but also made them race to spread their regulatory models. Using a novel dataset of competition statutes, we investigate this race to influence the world’s regulatory landscape and find that the EU’s competition laws have been more widely emulated than the US’s competition laws. We then argue that both “push” and “pull” factors explain the appeal of the EU’s competition regime: the …

Beyond Trade Deals: Charting A Post-Brexit Course For Uk Investment Treaties, Lise Johnson, Lorenzo Cotula

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

The Brexit referendum has raised questions about the future terms of the United Kingdom’s engagement with the world economy. While a debate over the UK’s future approach to trade deals has already begun, a similar discussion has yet to develop on the treaties that govern foreign investment. As this briefing note by Lorenzo Cotula of the International Institute for Environment and Development, and Lise Johnson of CCSI highlights, the stakes are high: ill-designed treaties could leave the UK excessively exposed to legal claims by foreign companies and could fail to address relevant economic, social and environmental challenges. While meaningful negotiations …

Formalism And Functionalism In Antitrust Treatment Of Loyalty Rebates: A Comparative Perspective, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

It is a widely held belief that U.S. antitrust law has long been characterized by economic functionalism and that European antitrust law has long been characterized by legal formalism.' The received wisdom began to change in Europe a decade ago when the Directorate General Competition of the European Commission (DG Comp) began to advocate a more "effects-based" analysis of abuse of dominance. Two factors arguably contributed to this change. First, the DG Comp became increasingly influenced by economists who had little use for the old formalism. Second, as Europe trie to spread antitrust to developing antitrust regimes across the world-and, …

Investor-State Dispute Settlement, Public Interest And U.S. Domestic Law, Lise Johnson, Lisa E. Sachs, Jeffrey D. Sachs

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

As negotiations are ongoing in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Agreement (TTIP), CCSI staff and Jeffrey Sachs discuss the implications of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) for domestic law and policy, focusing on effects within the US. The paper concludes that the risks ISDS poses for domestic law are significant and unjustified, and that there are preferable policy alternatives to pursue as a means of protecting the rights of investors operating overseas.

U.S. Vs. European Broadband Deployment: What Do The Data Say?, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

As the Internet becomes more important to the everyday lives of people around the world, commentators have tried to identify the best policies increasing the deployment and adoption of high-speed broadband technologies. Some claim that the European model of service-based competition, induced by telephone-style regulation, has outperformed the facilities-based competition underlying the US approach to promoting broadband deployment. The mapping studies conducted by the US and the EU for 2011 and 2012 reveal that the US led the EU in many broadband metrics.

• High-Speed Access: A far greater percentage of US households had access to Next Generation Access (NGA) …

Competition Policy And The Technologies Of Information, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

When we speak about information and competition policy we are usually thinking about oral or written communications that have an anticompetitive potential, and mainly in the context of collusion of exclusionary threats. These are important topics. Indeed, among the most difficult problems that competition policy has had to confront over the years is understanding communications that can be construed as either threats to exclude or as offers to collude or facilitators of collusion.

My topic here, however, is the relationship between information technologies and competition policy. Technological change can both induce and undermine the use of information to facilitate anticompetitive …

Post-Sale And Related Distribution Restraints Involving Ip Rights, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

This book of CASES AND MATERIALS ON INNOVATION AND COMPETITION POLICY is intended for educational use. The book is free for all to use subject to an open source license agreement. It differs from IP/antitrust casebooks in that it considers numerous sources of competition policy in addition to antitrust, including those that emanate from the intellectual property laws themselves, and also related issues such as the relationship between market structure and innovation, the competitive consequences of regulatory rules governing technology competition such as net neutrality and interconnection, misuse, the first sale doctrine, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Chapters …

Extraterritorial Criminal Jurisdiction Under The Antitrust Laws, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

The Ninth Circuit may soon consider whether challenges to antitrust activity that occurs abroad must invariably be addressed under the rule of reason, which will make criminal prosecution difficult or impossible.

When antitrust cases involve foreign conduct, the courts customarily appraise its substantive antitrust significance only after deciding whether the Sherman Act reaches the activity. Nevertheless, "jurisdictional" and "substantive" inquiries are not wholly independent. Both reflect two sound propositions: that Congress did not intend American antitrust law to rule the entire commercial world and that Congress knew that domestic economic circumstances often differ from those abroad where mechanical application of …

Comparative Antitrust Federalism: Review Of Cengiz, Antitrust Federalism In The Eu And The Us, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

This brief essay reviews Firat Cengiz’s book Antitrust Federalism in the EU and the US (2012), which compares the role of federalism in the competition law of the European Union and the United States. Both of these systems are “federal,” of course, because both have individual nation-states (Europe) or states (US) with their own individual competition provisions, but also an overarching competition law that applies to the entire group. This requires a certain amount of cooperation with respect to both territorial reach and substantive coverage.

Cengiz distinguishes among “markets,” “hierarchies,” and “networks” as forms of federalism. Markets are the least …

The Brussels Effect, Anu Bradford

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the unprecedented and deeply underestimated global power that the EU is exercising through its legal institutions and standards, and how it successfully exports that influence to the rest of the world. Without the need to use international institutions or seek other nations' cooperation, the EU has a strong and growing ability to promulgate regulations that become entrenched in the legal frameworks of developed and developing markets alike, leading to a notable "Europeanization" of many important aspects of global commerce. The Article identifies the precise conditions for and the specific mechanism through which this externalization of EU's standards …

Arbitration And Antitrust: Navigating The Contours Of Mandatory Law, Charles H. Brower Ii

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Rethinking Merger Efficiencies, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

The two leading merger systems-those of the United States and the European Union-treat the potential benefits and risks of mergers asymmetrically. Both systems require considerably greater proof of efficiencies than they do of potential harms if the efficiencies are to offset concerns over the accumulation or exercise of market power The implicit asymmetry principle has important systemic effects for merger control. It not only stands in the way of some socially desirable mergers but also may indirectly facilitate the clearance of some socially undesirable mergers. Neither system explicitly justifies this asymmetry, and none of the plausible justifications are normatively supportable. …

Toward A Unified Theory Of Exclusionary Vertical Restraints, Daniel A. Crane, Graciela Miralles

Articles

The law of exclusionary vertical restraints-contractual or other business relationships between vertically related firms-is deeply confused and inconsistent in both the United States and the European Union. A variety of vertical practices, including predatory pricing, tying, exclusive dealing, price discrimination, and bundling, are treated very differently based on formalistic distinctions that bear no relationship to the practices' exclusionary potential. We propose a comprehensive, unified test for all exclusionary vertical restraints that centers on two factors: foreclosure and substantiality. We then assign economic content to these factors. A restraint forecloses if it denies equally efficient rivals a reasonable opportunity to make …

The Future Of Article 82: Dissecting The Conflict, David J. Gerber

All Faculty Scholarship

Underlying the recurring debates over the future of Article 82 EC are competing images of what its goals are and should be. Such debates about the interpretation and application of Article 82 are not new, and they are also not likely to end, because the legal concept of “abuse” is sufficiently abstract and capacious to allow multiple conceptions of its goals. Where goals become contested and controversial, however, debates can lead to confusion and uncertainty rather than progress in thinking about the issues, and this threatens to occur in the context of discussions of Article 82 and its future. Clashing …

Two Forms Of Modernization In European Competition Law (Symposium), David J. Gerber

All Faculty Scholarship

In European competition law, the term "modernization" has been a catchword and focus of attention since the late 1990s. Usually, the reference is to "procedural" or "institutional" modernization. The European Commission used the term "modernization" in referring to the important set of changes in the institutional structure and procedures of competition law that it introduced in 2004, and it has fundamentally changed important procedures for developing and applying competition law in Europe. During the same period in which this form of modernization was proceeding, another form of "modernization" was also taking shape that represents a fundamental reorientation of much of …

The "Modernisation" Of European Community Competition Law: Achieving Consistency In Enforcement-Part Ii (With P. Cassinis), David J. Gerber

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Evolution Of A European Competition Law Network, David J. Gerber

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The European Commission's Ge/Honeywell Decision: U.S. Responses And Their Implications, David J. Gerber

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Modernizing European Competition Law: A Developmental Perspective, David J. Gerber

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Competition Law And International Trade: The European Union And The Neo-Liberal Factor, David J. Gerber

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Relevant Market In European Merger Law, Benedicte Haubold

LLM Theses and Essays

Due to the rapid acceleration of merger movements in the 1980s, the adoption of new merger regulation was a must for the European market. Before the new merger regulation was adopted in 1989, the European Commission used to apply the general competition rules of the Rome Treaty when dealing with mergers. The Commission used to interpret Articles 85 and 86 of the Rome Treaty as a means to condemn mergers that would lead to an abuse of a dominant position at a European level; at that time, there was an absence of complete and systematic control as far as structural …

Constitutionalizing The Economy: German Neo-Liberalism, Competition Law And The "New" Europe, David J. Gerber

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Transformation Of European Community Competition Law, David J. Gerber

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Origins Of The European Competition Law Tradition In Fin-De-Siecle Austria, David J. Gerber

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Law And The Abuse Of Economic Power In Europe, David J. Gerber

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Efficiency Justifications In U.S.-American And West German Merger Control Law: A Comparison, Christian Westerhausen

LLM Theses and Essays

When merger control laws first emerged in the United States and West Germany in the early 1900s, some businessmen and economists argued that the efficiency of businesses was impeded by antimerger laws. They contended that only very large businesses could realize significant efficiencies, be internationally competitive, and attain technological progress. This paper analyzes the role that these efficiency arguments had on the laws in West Germany and the United States, respectively. German law mainly upheld the idea that preservation of competition was most important for business efficiency, but also included a provision that firms could put forward the social desirability …

The Injury Test Under The Us And Eec Antidumping And Courntervailing Law, Francois Gabriel

LLM Theses and Essays

Antidumping and countervailing legislation contain two tests. First, is the import product dumped or subsidized? Second, is it causing injury to the domestic producers? The latter test, which is the most controversial in the history of antidumping and countervailing legislation, is, in a comparative perspective between the EEC and the USA, the focus of this thesis.