Course 1: UK and EU Competition Law

Course 1 of our Comparative Competition Law Summer School is a five-day intensive masterclass on UK and EU competition law, including practical workshops and course evaluation.

The programme covers the full suite of competition law substantive topics and procedure and integrates insights from law, policy and economics. It reflects the most up-to-date experience in the practice of competition law and risk management, including in the burgeoning field of private damages actions.

The UK’s withdrawal from the EU presents new challenges and opportunities for the development of UK competition law and where the UK is expected to continue to be a prominent competition law regime internationally.

The course will explore:

• The key legal, economic and policy foundations of competition law
• The role of economics in competition law
• The treatment under EU and UK competition law of agreements, commercial practices and mergers and their impact on international transactions
• Sector and market investigations in the EU and UK
• The intersection between IP and competition law
• The application of competition law to activities by the state including EU state aid and public procurement law and EU public law contained in Article 106 TFEU and Article 4(3) TEU
• Issues for competition law risk management including dawn raids, criminalisation and leniency
• The relationship between competition law and sector regulation and the application of competition law in specific industry sectors (e.g. communications, energy, financial services, healthcare, and transport)
• The impact of Brexit on EU and UK competition law

Key benefits:

• Insights from the EU and UK experience in this fast-moving and high profile area
• Interactive case studies and workshops
• Experience and presentation from a leading practitioner and author in the field, Suzanne Rab who has advised on some of the largest competition law deals internationally and is author of leading texts on competition law and IPR.  Suzanne is the author of Atkins Court Forms in Civil Proceedings, Competition Law, Volume 10, 2016; Cross-Border Copyright Licensing, Law and Practice, Elgar Intellectual Property Law and Practice series, 2018 (co-contributor); Indian Competition Law, an International Perspective (first published by Wolters Kluwer, May 2012; with a supplement of cartel regulation published in January 2013) 
• Certificate of Satisfactory Completion on satisfactory completion of the course and Competition Law Certificate of Attendance upon achieving the required pass-mark
• Opportunity to combine the course with Course 2 (Practical Skills for Competition Dispute Resolution), Course 3 (International Competition Law) and Course 4 (Comparative Media Ownership Regulation)

The course will be of particular interest to:

• Non-competition lawyers (or competition lawyers post-career break) who want to acquire an understanding of competition law sufficient to have the right reflexes to be able to identify competition issues in their day-to-day work.
• Post-graduate students who want a taster of competition law before deciding whether to specialise by doing an LLM or PhD in competition law.
• New staff at UK competition and regulatory authorities as part of their induction.
• Mid-sized UK law firms who want to give trainees or recently qualified lawyers an understanding of competition law, but who do not have the size/depth of in-house expertise to organise the training internally.
• Large companies/companies based in UK/EU more likely to be the object of competition law scrutiny who want to give staff an understanding of competition law, but who do not have the size/depth of in-house expertise to organise the training internally.
• Regulatory policy-makers seeking a robust substantive and practical grounding in EU and UK competition law to inform their development of competition and regulatory policy.

Duration:

Five half days plus evaluation (submitted electronically).

The course timetable: