Ms Laura Guttuso is a former, outstanding UQ PhD candidate and recipient of prestigious American Bar Association and UQ scholarships. She passed away unexpectedly in April 2016 while conducting research in the USA for her PhD thesis.

Laura started her legal career working as an Associate and Senior Associate at Herbert Smith Freehills in London, specialising in EU and UK competition law. She subsequently moved to the UK competition authority, where she performed a number of roles, notably, Senior Legal and Policy Adviser, Team Leader in the Cartels Group, and Assistant-Director in the General Counsel’s Office.

Laura was born in Brussels and educated at the European School before obtaining a BSc (International Relations) degree from the London School of Economics, and a law degree from Cambridge University. In 2013, she obtained First Class Honours in her LLM from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, for her research on the treatment of leniency materials in competition litigation proceedings.

Laura's published work on anti-cartel enforcement contributed notably to the competition law field. Laura received the 2015 Owen Fletcher Publication Award for her book chapter ‘Leniency and the Two Faces of Janus: Where Public and Private Enforcement Merge and Converge’ in Caron Beaton-Wells and Christopher Tran (Ed.), Anti-cartel enforcement in a contemporary age: the leniency religion.

Her unfinished PhD thesis included novel ways of thinking and had the potential to significantly contribute to competition law at the global level as recognised by the national and international keynote speakers of this symposium. The symposium papers will develop and analyse elements of her unfinished PhD research, including legal pluralism, fairness and optimising private and public enforcement by addressing and balancing corporate and individual accountability and deterrence on one hand, and achieving corrective justice and sufficiently recognising harm suffered from cartels by consumers and other victims on the other.

Articles from the symposium were published in a special issue of the University of Queensland Law Journal, ‘Cartels, Optimal Enforcement and Theories in Competition Law’. View full text.