Law Commons^™

Do Legal Origins Predict Legal Substance?, Anu Bradford, Yun-Chien Chang, Adam S. Chilton, Nuno Garoupa

Faculty Scholarship

There is a large body of research in economics and law suggesting that the legal origin of a country – that is, whether its legal regime is based on English common law or French, German, or Nordic civil law – profoundly impacts a range of outcomes. However, the exact relationship between legal origin and legal substance has been disputed in the literature and not fully explored with nuanced legal coding. We revisit this debate while leveraging novel cross-country data sets that provide detailed coding of two areas of laws: property and antitrust. We find that having shared legal origins strongly …

Troubled Waters Between U.S. And European Antitrust, D. Daniel Sokol

D. Daniel Sokol

Antitrust is an important area of law and policy for most companies in the world. Having divergent rules across antitrust systems means that the same economic behavior may be treated differently depending on the jurisdiction, leading to disparate outcomes in which one jurisdiction finds illegal behavior (but the other does not) when the underlying behavior may be pro-competitive. This disparate set of outcomes creates a world in which the most stringent antitrust system may produce the global standard. As a result, if the antitrust rules applied are too rigid, they threaten to hurt consumers not merely in the jurisdiction where …

Troubled Waters Between U.S. And European Antitrust, D. Daniel Sokol

UF Law Faculty Publications

Antitrust is an important area of law and policy for most companies in the world. Having divergent rules across antitrust systems means that the same economic behavior may be treated differently depending on the jurisdiction, leading to disparate outcomes in which one jurisdiction finds illegal behavior (but the other does not) when the underlying behavior may be pro-competitive. This disparate set of outcomes creates a world in which the most stringent antitrust system may produce the global standard. As a result, if the antitrust rules applied are too rigid, they threaten to hurt consumers not merely in the jurisdiction where …

The Evolution Of Chinese Merger Notification Guidelines: A Work In Progress Integrating Global Consensus And Domestic Imperatives, Susan Beth Farmer

Susan Beth Farmer

China is among the most recent entrants into global competition enforcement, having adopted the first competition law of general application, the Anti-Monopoly Law (AML) after more than a decade of drafting. The AML and Merger Notification Thresholds, rules issued by decree of the State Council, became effective on August 3, 2008. Both the law and the guidelines were subject to public review and comment, and went through a number of drafts before final adoption.

This article is a comprehensive comparison of merger standards across jurisdictions, with particular focus on the evolution of merger regulation in China. It comprises six parts; …

Resolving Competition Related Disputes Under The Aml: Theory & Practice, Susan Beth Farmer

Susan Beth Farmer

This presentation was given at the European China Law Studies 2014 Conference, Making, Enforcing and Accessing the Law, in Hong Kong. The presentation addresses the Chinese Anti-Monopoly Law (AML), the MOFCOMM, NDRC, and SAIC, and litigation before the Supreme People's Court.

The Second Decentralisation Of Competition Law — A Must For An Orderly Administration Of Justice In The Eu, Emanuela Matei, Valentin Mircea

Emanuela A. Matei

The article relies upon the postulate that the European system of competition enforcement could benefit from a transplantation of a lot vaster American experiences in the field of private litigation.

Resolving Competition Related Disputes Under The Aml: Theory & Practice, Susan Beth Farmer

Presentations

This presentation was given at the European China Law Studies 2014 Conference, Making, Enforcing and Accessing the Law, in Hong Kong. The presentation addresses the Chinese Anti-Monopoly Law (AML), the MOFCOMM, NDRC, and SAIC, and litigation before the Supreme People's Court.

The Law And Economics Of (Functional) Antitrust Standing In The United States And The European Union, Jeffrey L. Harrison

UF Law Faculty Publications

To date, and despite pressures toward convergence, the United States and the European Union have taken different paths with respect to the enforcement of antitrust laws by private parties and, therefore, differ dramatically in levels of functional standing. U.S. law is more encouraging to private enforcement than E.U. law but has a narrower view of whom those private parties are permitted to be. In the European Union, the eligible parties are broad but the motivation of any single party to bring an action is quite low. In the United States, the substantive law and much of the procedural law flow …

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 …

"Consumer Choice" Is Where We Are All Going - So Let's Go Together, Neil W. Averitt, Robert H. Lande, Paul Nihoul

All Faculty Scholarship

Globalisation of business makes it important for firms to predict how their behaviour is likely to be treated in the roughly 200 nations that have competition laws. In that context, a crucial question is: are we in a position to develop a common intellectual framework that would give coherence to policy statements made on specific competition related issues and, at the same time, be acceptable, broadly, in a variety of legal systems, not necessarily based on identical assumptions? We believe that the answer is “yes.” A concept is emerging as a possible source of unification for competition policies around the …

The Right To Food And Buyer Power, Aravind Ganesh

Aravind Ganesh

Modern global food supply chains are characterised by extreme levels of concentration in the middle of those chains. This paper argues that such concentration leads to excessive buyer power, which harms the consumers and food producers at the ends of the supply chains. This paper argues that the harms suffered by farmers are serious enough as to constitute violations of the international human right to food as it is expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Political Rights, and further argues that world competition law regimes cannot ignore these human rights …

The Evolution Of Chinese Merger Notification Guidelines: A Work In Progress Integrating Global Consensus And Domestic Imperatives, Susan Beth Farmer

Journal Articles

China is among the most recent entrants into global competition enforcement, having adopted the first competition law of general application, the Anti-Monopoly Law (AML) after more than a decade of drafting. The AML and Merger Notification Thresholds, rules issued by decree of the State Council, became effective on August 3, 2008. Both the law and the guidelines were subject to public review and comment, and went through a number of drafts before final adoption.

This article is a comprehensive comparison of merger standards across jurisdictions, with particular focus on the evolution of merger regulation in China. It comprises six parts; …

The Convergence Of Law In An Era Of Political Integration: The Wood Pulp Case And The Alcoa Doctrine, James J. Friedberg

Faculty & Staff 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 …