The third edition of Faull and Nikpay: The EU Law of Competition has just been published. This is a significantly expanded edition: Fully updated in this third edition, the work includes full coverage of the latest legislation, case law and guidance, giving competition lawyers a comprehensive commentary on recent developments. It includes new material on industries of growing importance in the competition field, including Pharma and High Tech. It also analyses the R&D and Specialisation Block Exemption Regulations, the revised Verticals Block Exemption Regulation, and the Technology Transfer Block Exemption. Key cases covered in this edition include Telefonica, Microsoft, Intel, Rambus, RWE, and GdF. The Communications chapter that I co-wrote in the first and second editions has been replaced […]
A post in another place about Areeda’s article on essential facilities – “an epithet in need of limiting principles” – reminded me that limiting principles are not only needed to decrease the risks of over-enforcement. Areeda’s legitimate concern about nuance being lost in the application of precedent applies also to precedents which limit liability. They are relevant to under-enforcement as well. From hard cases to bad law Areeda wrote: “As with most instances of judging by catch-phrase, the law evolves in three stages: (1) An extreme case arises to which a court responds. (2) The language of the response is then applied -often mechanically, sometimes cleverly- to expand the application. With too few judges experienced enough with the subject to […]
Alfonso Lamadrid on Chillin Competition, commented earlier today on an interesting paper by Javier Berasategi bringing together issues of competition law, supermarkets and technology. In passing he noted that I’d already brought groceries and tech together with my “exploding banana hypothesis.” I’m grateful to him for highlighting my valuable contribution to the jurisprudence on perishable fruit and cross border trade. For the curious, here are the relevant paragraphs from my book on competition law and regulation of technology markets: 7.07 Are there circumstances where product design can achieve what would otherwise be unlawful under the competition rules? 7.08 For example, EU competition law prohibits many vertical restraints that restrict parallel trade. In the United Brands case the Commission, in a decision upheld […]
Too often we tend to assume that if we can write down a question – in a request for information – then business can write down the answer just as simply. (This is the second article in what I hope will be a series covering “Mistakes the Other Side Make”. For an introduction to the series see here. It says a lot about the European Commission that they allow me to publish articles that admit that not everything is perfect about how we work.) I’m guilty of this assumption. A few years ago I wrote a request for information to a company asking for a map of their entire corporate structure, together with background information on each company. The lawyer […]