1,722,187 research outputs found
Scaling experimentalism : from convergence to informed divergence in transnational competition policy
No full textThe chapter examines three processes that disclose a turn towards experimentalist governance in transnational competition policy. The first results from the growing formalization of the interactions between the US and the EU, which has enabled their authorities to learn from each other’s practices, but also to document and revise such learning.. A second process stems from attempts to make the International Competition Network more useful for newer agencies from the developing world, resulting in the identification of informed divergence as an important objective. Not only does this explicitly recognize members’ freedom to contextualize ICN recommended practices, but it has led to efforts to monitor and review national implementation. Finally, there is evidence that the EU’s promotion of competition policy does not focus on transplanting the EU model to other jurisdictions, but seeks both to co-design the rules and institutions with recipient states and to jointly monitor their performance
How consumer law travels
No full textThis article synthesizes a number of the findings and themes emerging from the various case studies presented about the efficacy of the transplantation process of the EU consumer acquis in some of the EU accession and new Member States. Specifically, the article examines the process of incorporation through the lens of the domestication of the consumer rules either through the making of the local consumer laws or their subsequent enforcement in the case study jurisdictions. The overall conclusions from the case studies are that accession pressures are an important impetus for legal reform in consumer law, that there is limited tailoring of the rules in their transposition, and that there is slow take up by local actors in the resolution of consumer problems. The article suggests that getting it right in the law-making process in tailoring the rules to local needs or the extant local law may not be crucial for their subsequent efficacy, both because deliberations about the efficacy and fit of the rules may be irresolvable ex ante and because the relevant collocutors often do not exist at the time of original enactment of the consumer laws. Yet if the transplanted rules can be enlivened through local institutions as spaces for contestation of the rights and responsibilities that arise under consumer law, they can be domesticated or contextualized precisely through processes of ongoing contestation. From that perspective, it is institutional diversity in implementation in different jurisdictions, remedial hybridity and EU monitoring of the efficacy of local solutions that can help unblock suboptimal local outcomes.13th MRM 201
The EU's private law in the regulated sectors : competitive market handmaiden or institutional platform?
No full textThe article contests the claim that EU private law is narrowly circumscribed by a market rationality. Such a claim tracks broader criticism of EU functional legal integration, although it tends to obscure the underlying transformative pressures on private law and regulation and the role EU law plays in coping with such pressures. To offer a number of counter-narratives, the article draws on examples from the regulated sectors, including telecommunications and energy, to reveal their experimentalist features. These suggest that EU private law is constructed through a process of error-corrections, which allows for mutual adjustment of instruments and hybridisation of EU and local policy goals. The process results in more finely grained assemblages of autonomy and regulation to respond to concrete problems or newly salient policy goals, so that markets are understood as social institutions that are always works-in-progress rather than convergence points. Thus, EU private law provides a platform for transnational market-building through innovating institutions that promote various normative and policy commitments despite the interdependencies that could undermine them.The article was written as part of the ERC funded project on European Regulatory Private Law
European regulatory private law : from conflicts to platforms
No full textDiscusses the normative design of European legal integration through the prism of private law, going beyond the conflict of laws perspective to the model of platform law
Settling or learning? : commitment decisions as a competition enforcement paradigm
No full textFirst published online 8 December 2014.An increasingly important aspect of EU competition enforcement since the implementation of the modernization package has been the Commission’s use of a procedure for resolving cases without finding a violation based on remedial commitments offered by the undertakings. Similar non-adversarial tools have been used by national competition authorities and in other regulatory fields. Their common characterization as settlement procedures for the negotiated closure of cases has fuelled concerns about possible overuse to reorganize markets and contractual relationships. This is particularly so given that commitments are relatively opaque, afford limited judicial review and have been used in cases where existing rules and precedents do not clearly point to a violation. The article argues that the settlement view may not sufficiently capture either the design or the potential of the commitments procedure as a policy-learning device in cases where there is doubt about the nature and gravity of competition concerns in unfamiliar and changing market environments. In light of the transformation towards an effects-based EU competition law, commitment-based decisions may not be a second-best alternative, but the preferred and sometimes only mode of enforcement. Given the now overwhelming concerns about the legitimate use of this instrument, the article discusses how existing mechanisms could supply accountability without sapping the advantages of commitments as a policy-learning device, including an alternative role for judicial review
(Re-)joining the regulatory fold? : problem-solving innovations in competition enforcement
No full textThe chapter tracks the emergence of problem-solving approaches to competition law implementation in the EU as an alternative to either the law enforcement or the regulatory approach to antitrust
Private actors and their advisers in administrative agency networks
No full textThe role of private actors in the activities of transnational agency networks
The fairness of contractual exchange in a private law society : early modern credit markets as a case study
No full textQuite apart from the question of the justifiability – based on prior normative commitments – of legal rules controlling the substance of contractual exchange, such as a fair price rule, a common complaint against such rules is based on the difficulties of implementing and enforcing them. Rather than proceeding from first principles, it is also possible to examine the consequences of ex ante and ex post controls on the fairness of contractual exchange in contexts where they have been imposed before testing such consequences against any normative commitments. Such an approach allows both to examine whether practical constraints on enforcing rules over the fairness of exchange are truly binding and, even if they are, whether such rules can have other either beneficial or negative effects on parties and on contract law more broadly. We present a case study of credit markets in a rural community in early modern France marked by the relative absence of the State as a regulatory agent. Our analysis points to, even very provisionally, possible functions of a weak mandatory rule even when overinclusive and difficult to enforce
Competition Law and Development Policy: Subordination, Self-Sufficiency or Integration?
No full textInternational competition lawyers often refer (with some pride) to the exponential growth of the number of jurisdictions in the world that have adopted antitrust enforcement regimes since the early 1990s. Namely, over 100 national jurisdictions now have some competition law mechanism and in addition, quite a few regional integration regimes contain competition provisions. Since industrialised countries have been covered by the more established and long-standing antitrust regimes in the US and the EU, much of that growth is due to the adoption of competition laws by transition and developing economies. Some of those jurisdictions have adopted or strengthened their competition enforcement regimes of their own initiative. However, more often, such a regime is implemented at the instigation or encouragement of international donors and development bodies, such as the World Bank, the IMF, as well as the EU.
The volume examined the future of competition law in achieving development objectives in third world countries. It was thus of interdisciplinary character and included a contribution from William Kovacic, one of the most eminent US competition law scholars
Financial Supervision in the Interstices Between Private and Public Law
No full textEmpirical research on the current supervisory practices of national and EU financial agencies in the area of financial product regulation and investor protection
- …
