Judicial Review of Competition Law Enforcement in the EU Member States and the UK

International Competition Law Series#91

Enforcement of competition law often calls for a complex economic and legal assessment, and the review of those enforcement decisions usually falls to national courts. In this connection, however, European competition law and legal scholarship have offered scant guidance on how judicial review should and does function. This book, the first comprehensive, systematic, and comparative empirical study of judicial review of competition law public enforcement in the EU and the UK, provides a thorough understanding of the practical operation of the role of judicial review in competition enforcement.

 A country-by-country analysis, along with a detailed introduction and an incisive comparative summary, covers all publicly available judicial review judgments – 5,707 in all – of final public enforcement actions in relation to Articles 101 and 102 TFEU and relevant national provisions in the twenty-seven EU Member States and the UK rendered between 1 May 2004 and 30 April 2021. The data presented draws on a rich database built for the purpose of this study by twenty-eight national teams of competition law academics and practitioners.

For each jurisdiction, the analysis focuses on such aspects as the following:

•         structure of the national enforcement system;

•         number of judgments rendered;

•         success rate;

•         types of appellants;

•         competition rules subject to review;

•         grounds of review;

•         use of preliminary references;

•         appeals involving leniency and/or settlements; and

•         role of third parties.

Numerous graphs, figures, and tables support the presentation.

 In the light it sheds on trends in judicial review of competition law enforcement on a comparative basis, and in its data-driven assessment of how the decentralised judicial review of EU competition law meets EU integration aims, this important study will be of inestimable value to competition lawyers, policymakers, and academics in developing a confident understanding of precisely how judicial review in this area operates in each of the EU Member States and the UK. In addition, the book provides a significant contribution not only with respect to EU and national competition laws but also, more broadly, to comparative administrative law scholarship in Europe.