Dr Konstantinos Stylianou

School of Law, Faculty of Social Sciences

Finding the Scope of EU Competition Law: Tools and Analysis

Responsive Mode Impact Fund

Competition law is one of the most potent generalist legal tools controlling the conduct of companies and the European Commission and national competition authorities enjoy significant powers of enforcement. What they use those powers for, i.e. what the ultimate goal of competition law is, has a tremendous impact on the economy: it decides whether we can break up large corporations like Google, restrict the use of personal data by Facebook, allow Amazon to use information gathered on products sold on its platform to develop its own products, or set fair and reasonable prices for drugs and vaccines to fight to coronavirus pandemic.

The project investigates empirically, for the first time comprehensively and with such broad scope, the goals of competition law through searching and cataloguing thousands of EU Court decisions, Advocate General opinions, Commission decisions, and Commissioner speeches. It looks not only in traditional goals such as “market structure” and “welfare” but also contemporary ones such as “fairness”, “privacy” and “sustainability”.

It provides a solid empirical basis for the debate and makes available, on a dedicated website, all the data for reasons of transparency and to enable further research. It also provides competition authorities, researchers, industry, and law firms a case search tool of Commission decisions relating to antitrust and mergers. The only existing similar search tool, does not allow for keyword search and does not include decisions prior to 1979 and there is strong demand for the updated and fully-functional search tool that this project will deliver.

Dr Konstantinos Stylianou can be contacted by email: K.Stylianou@leeds.ac.uk