Newsblog

On 22 November 2024 at 2 pm CET (Brussels time) we invite all ASCOLA Members to join us for the second ASCOLA NOEL – the November Online Event Live!  We are pleased to announce the return of the ASCOLA NOEL event. The theme this year is “Critical Perspectives of Competition Law”. The event will be held on Zoom.  We are honoured to have three speakers to share with us their perspectives of competition law. Dina Waked of Sciences Po will give us her critical evaluation of competition law and economics. Kati Cseres of University of Amsterdam will speak about competition law and feminism. And finally, Gregory Day of University of Georgia will address the race problem in US antitrust.  (The photos show Dina, Kati and Greg from left to right). The discussant is Giorgio Monti, member of the ASCOLA Executive Committee. Join us for a critical reflection on competition policy – and for seeing the ASCOLA family from all over the world, at least virtually.  More information is available here.

The ASCOLA Annual Conference 2025 will take place in Chicago, IL, USA upon invitation by Professor Spencer Weber Waller. Mark your calendars – the conference will take place from 26-28 June 2025 at the Loyola University Chicago. It is the third time that ASCOLA will hold its Annual Conference in the USA.

Professor Waller heads the Institute for Consumer Antitrust Studies at Loyola. The Call for Papers and the Conference Website will be published in due course here. The picture shows how Professor Waller invited the ASCOLA community to Chicago on the occasion of the ASCOLA Conference 2024 in Würzburg.

Liang Li is the winner of the 2024 Best Junior Paper Award of the Academic Society for Competition Law (ASCOLA). Her paper, presented at the Annual Conference in Würzburg, has the title: “A Reconception of Power in Competition Law with Its Application in the Digital Realm”, and it partly builds on her PhD thesis. Liang Li is an Associate Professor and an MA tutor at the China University of Political Science and Law, Beijing. The Jury was chaired by Fabiana Di Porto with David Gerber and Thomas Cheng as further jurors. The Jury said that the paper “is impressive for its willingness to challenge the existing understanding of something as fundamental as the concept of market power and proposes a workable alternative. It does so by providing a new and original theoretical framework and taxonomy, that might have several possible applications.” The photo shows Liang Li with Thomas Cheng, member of the jury and of the ASCOLA Executive Committee. The previous winners of the award can be found here.

The Board of ASCOLA has adopted Guiding Principles on Diversity, Inclusion and Social Safety at ASCOLA Events in its session on 4 July 2024. You can find the Guiding Principles here.

More than 150 participants gather at Würzburg, Germany, from 4 July to 7 July 2024 for the 19th Annual Conference of ASCOLA, the Academic Society for Competition Law! We welcome all participants and are looking forward to a stellar conference with discussions on competition law and economics. Highlights include an Enforcers Panel, the first ASCOLA Concert, the Best Junior Paper Award and a panel with heads of ASCOLA’s Regional Chapters. May all participants have safe travels and great experiences in the ASCOLA family! Our profound thanks goes to Florian Bien and Björn Becker and their team for organising this event. Here is the link to the Conference Website!

On June 11, 2024, Heike Schweitzer has died. She was a law professor at the Humboldt University, Berlin, and one of the most influential academic voices in European competition law. She was a member of the Board of ASCOLA, the Academic Society for Competition Law, and served as ASCOLA’s Vice President from 2016-2019.

After having worked at the Hamburg Max Planck Institute (with Ernst-Joachim Mestmäcker), Heike Schweitzer was a professor at the European University Institute, at Mannheim University, at Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt University. She was heavily involved in policy debates on the national and international level, e.g. as a Special Adviser on digital issues to Commissioner Margrethe Vestager (together with Jacques Crémer and Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye).

Heike is remembered by many in the academic community as a brillant thinker with a clear compass and many innovative ideas, deeply rooted in doctrine, but driving the field of competition law forward. To many at ASCOLA, she was also an admired colleague, an inspiring teacher and adviser – and a good friend. We will miss her.

Good news on the ASCOLA Conference 2024 in Würzburg, hosted by Florian Bien and Björn Becker: The conference website is up and running! It will be constantly updated.

You can check it out here: https://www.jura.uni-wuerzburg.de/lehrstuehle/bien/ascola/

Are independent antitrust authorities a must-have for free market economies? The scholars, assembled in ASCOLA, the Academic Society for Competition Law, think so.

In February 2024, ASCOLA President Prof. Rupprecht Podszun and the head of ASCOLA’s Latin America Chapter, Prof. Juan David Gutiérrez, voiced their concern regarding developments in Latin America. In Mexico, the state president announced that he will present a bill to eliminate COFECE, the renowned competition agency. In countries like Colombia, Argentina and Costa Rica, politicians try to capture the agencies or undermine their functioning. “This is unsettling news for consumers, businesses, and investors. (…) The Latin American agencies have greatly inspired the debate in the past years”, write Podszun and Gutiérrez in an opinion piece for the Spanish-language newspaper El País. “If not wholly eliminated, as proposed in Mexico, competition agencies can die with a whimper, being raided of powers by limited budgets, political interference, or a leadership vacuum.”

The two authors call on the business community, practitioners in the field of competition law, scholars, other enforcers and politicians to preserve the powers and the independence of competition agencies – not only in Latin America.

The article is available in English here:

https://english.elpais.com/economy-and-business/2024-02-13/why-market-economies-need-watchdogs.html#

The Executive Committee and the hosts of the 2024 ASCOLA Conference in Würzburg have decided to extend the deadline for submissions to 5 February 2024. See the Call for Papers here.

On 20 November 2023, ASCOLA met for an online event, the ASCOLA NOEL, to discuss current development in competition law. The global roundtable, moderated by Giorgio Monti, assembled Mor Bakhoum (Senegal), Soojin Nam (Korea), Eleanor Fox (USA), Vlatka Butorac Malnar (Croatia), Magali Eben (UK) and Juan David Gutiérrez (Colombia). The discussion took place on the eve of the 20th birthday of ASCOLA – the Academic Society for Competition Law was founded in November 2003 in Munich. On this occasion, Josef Drexl, the founding president, shared some memories and ideas with the 80 participants. A video recording will be available on YouTube soon.