ASCOLA November Online Event Live 2025

20 November 2025 at 2 pm CET (Brussels time) we invite all ASCOLA Members to join us for the third ASCOLA NOEL – the November Online Event Live!

The theme this year is “Politics and Competition Law”. The event will be held at 14:00 CET on November 20 on Zoom. Joining details were sent via the newsletter. If you did not receive them, please contact Magali.Eben@glasgow.ac.uk.

ASCOLA Noel 2025 will focus on a topic that is taking on increasing salience in today’s world: competition law and politics. This 90-minute roundtable discussion will explore the phenomenon of the increasing politicization of competition law enforcement across the globe. There was a time when using competition law enforcement as a political tool can be said to be the exception rather than the rule. That is no longer the case. The politicization of competition law enforcement is seemingly no longer a taboo even among many of the established jurisdictions. This phenomenon has called into question the long-cherished premise that competition law enforcement is and is meant to be a technocratic endeavor and has profound and wide-ranging implications for competition law enforcement. This event will examine a number of questions raised by this development, such as the extent to which this is a truly recent development, whether this is an irreversible trend, and whether anything can be done within the competition law community about it.

We are honoured to have four speakers to share with us their perspectives on politics and competition law. Speakers:

Viktoria Robertson, Maciej Bernatt, John Newman, Soojin Nam

Chair: Professor Thomas Cheng

ASCOLA November Online Event Live 2024

On 22 November 2024 at 2 pm CET (Brussels time) we held the 2nd ASCOLA NOEL – the November Online Event Live! The theme was “Critical Perspectives of Competition Law”. Speakers were Dina Waked of Sciences Po speaking about problematic assumptions in competition law. Kati Cseres of University of Amsterdam spoke about competition law and feminism. Gregory Day of University of Georgia addressed the race problem in US antitrust. The pictures show Dina, Kati and Greg from left to right. Wendy Ng moderated the second NOEL, and Giorgio Monti served as a discussant. Wendy and Giorgio are members of the ASCOLA Executive Committee. The video is available on our YouTube Channel!

ASCOLA November Online Event Live 2023

We held the 1st ASCOLA NOEL on 20 November 2023, on the eve of 20th birthday of ASCOLA. In a 90 minutes session, we first looked back with Josef Drexl, the founding president of ASCOLA. He shared the initial story of ASCOLA that was inspired by Hanns Ullrich and Roger Zäch and remembered the time when globalisation still held a promise for the whole world. Times have changed, but as Josef said we should never let the conversation stop so as to overcome the clashes.

After that we had Roundtable with excellent speakers who gave an overview of the developments in competition law in their jurisdiction. The speakers were:

Giorgio Monti (Tilburg University) was the moderator. When he finally asked the speakers what they would put on their wishlist (with a view to Noel…), this is what they said: Mor Bakhoum asked for more cooperation and transnational debate. Soojin Nam wants a due process reform. Eleanor Fox wishes for the US to start to look who wins and who loses from markets and from enforcement and to turn to those who persistently lose. Vlatka Butorac Malnar wants a recognition of competition policy as an important element of the economy. Magali Eben (who stepped in at short notice for Heike Schweitzer) would love to see clearer theories of harm. Juan David Gutiérrez finally requested changing governments to build on their agencies – it is easy, he said, to destroy a functioning agency, but it is hard to build one.

A video recording is available on YouTube.

The next ASCOLA NOEL will be held in November 2024!