Kluwer Competition Law Blog

The Global Competition Law Center at the College of Europe and the UCL Center for Law, Economics and Society

organize on Wednesday, June 8, 2016 from 9:00 AM to 7:00 PM

a scholarship symposium dedicated to

COMPETITION POLICY AT THE INTERSECTION OF EQUITY AND EFFICIENCY

Honoring the Scholarship of Eleanor M. Fox (NYU)

with

Eleanor Fox, Mario Monti, Harry First, Mor Bakhoum, Michal Gal, David Lewis, Frederic Jenny, Dennis Davis, Philip Marsden, Spencer Weber Waller, Allan Fels, Damien Neven, Diane Wood, Giuliano Amato, Donald Baker, Josef Drexl, Albert Foer, Maurice Stucke, Heike Schweitzer, Ariel Ezrachi, Simon Roberts, Daniel Sokol, Ian Forrester, Dan Crane, Giorgio Monti, Dan Rubinfeld, Edward Iacobucci, Damien Gerard and Ioannis Lianos

The tension between “equity” and “efficiency”, and a possible trade-off between these objectives, has been one of the major questions bedevilling economics and, more generally, political philosophy in liberal democracies, but also beyond. In particular, the equity versus efficiency trade-off debate has played a defining role in the transformation of the dominant paradigm governing competition law enforcement at least since the late 1970s due to the growing influence of economics and economists in competition law and policy discourse, and the internationalisation of antitrust. The debate remains crucial today as issues of inequality and its interaction with efficiency become of central concern to policy and decision-makers in competition law, as well as in other spheres of public policy. Yet, despite their central role in the grammar of competition law on the global plane, few scholars have explored the intellectual underpinnings of the interactions between “equity” and “efficiency” in the context of competition/antitrust law.

Eleanor Fox constitutes one of the exceptions, as, during her long and illustrious academic career, she has been the author of a body of work directly engaging with the conceptualization of the relationship between “efficiency” and “equity”, drawing lessons for U.S antitrust law, EU competition law and the competition law systems of emergent and developing countries. Furthermore, Fox has written on and influenced various transformations in competition policy since the 1980’s, in the US and worldwide. Her scholarship is characterized by a willingness to uncover the diversity of approaches underlying antitrust enforcement, to deny the superiority of any single paradigm and to bridge differences in order to foster understanding. In a world where antitrust enforcement has become truly global, antitrust standards have turned into the prevalent form of business regulation and antitrust enforcement has to cope with fast-paced innovation, Professor Fox’s scholarship appears distinctively compelling. In addition, because of her intellectual openness and collegial work ethic, Eleanor Fox has become a mentor for a generation of younger scholars spread around the world, who strive to emulate her concern to account for the complexity of the forces at play in the field of antitrust as a mirror of social tensions, traditions and evolutions.

FULL PROGRAM AVAILABLE HERE

Location: Bibliothèque Solvay
137 Rue Belliard (Parc Leopold)
1040 Brussels
Belgium

For attending this event, please register HERE.

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