Review of Elhauge & Geradin´s Global Competition Law and Economics

Nov 05, 2007

Professors Einer Elhauge and Damien Geradin begin the preface to their new casebook, Global Competition Law and Economics, by observing that no one would think of writing a casebook on Massachusetts antitrust law. They then suggest that for similar reasons an approach to antitrust law based on a single legal system is also becoming outmoded. Businessmen, lawyers, and lawmakers must, according to the authors, understand not just their own system but also the other regimes that form part of the global legal framework that regulates competitive behaviour. This leads them to conclude that modern antitrust law is thus global antitrust law.While the authors acknowledge that significant differences remain between U.S. antitrust law and EC competition law, they see these differences as reflecting different presumptions about how to resolve theoretical or empirical ambiguities, arising in a commonly accepted analytical framework. The authors are therefore convinced that the combination of laws from varying nations in actual practice provides a truer picture of the overall regime of competition law that now faces multinational players. They present their work as a book designed to replace more parochial books on basic antitrust law by giving a more realistic sense of the range of issues and analyses relevant to modern antitrust law wherever practised. Given these bold claims, it is appropriate in reviewing this work to consider the validity of the authors premise that modern antitrust law constitutes, in some meaningful way, a global legal regime. It is also appropriate to discuss the extent to which the materials as presented in the book vindicate the authors conviction that a global approach is the best way to present basic antitrust law to students.