Notes From a Small Island: Natural Justice and the Institutional Design and Practice of Competition Authorities and Appellate Courts

The relationship between the institutional design, decision-making powers, and policy-making functions of competition authorities raises a diverse range of complex issues. These include how the authority’s independence can be safeguarded, how it is funded, how to optimize resources, how to avoid confirmation bias, how to relate with non-competition authorities (e.g., sectoral regulators with concurrent powers or overlapping jurisdiction), and the relationship with the judiciary. This article starts from the optimistic — not to mention extremely presumptuous — position of trying to use the concepts of natural justice and procedural fairness as developed in the United Kingdom as something of a template for good practice and institutional design in competition law decision-making and appeals generally. Apart from familiarity (from the authors’ perspective), there are some good reasons to do so. First, outside the realms of antiquity, the United Kingdom can lay a fair claim to popularizing the notion of a rule of law. Second, the United Kingdom is one of the oldest and most prominent adopters of a system of adversarial justice where the ability to challenge evidence remains paramount. Third, the common law is characterized as much by pragmatism as strict principle.