About the program
Competition/antitrust law plays a significant role in the economy of individual countries, their welfare, and the welfare of individuals, especially consumers. For instance, anticompetitive behaviour leads to higher prices and less innovation and services for consumers, and also to an unwelcomed usage of data in digital markets.
Competition law significantly impacts the ways in which companies and other entities, including multinational corporations, conduct their businesses. It influences the economic markets and their concentrations, and can also influence relationships between individual states.
Although competition law is a jurisdiction-based area of law, with each country having its own national competition-law regime (where established), competition, as an economic process, can occur both nationally and internationally. The digital economy in which we live has been increasing the internationalisation of various relevant markets, as well as introducing new international issues for competition law and policy.
Therefore, competition law and its policy have a significant tendency to be influenced by other competition law regimes, and competition law authorities cooperate at various levels, from more formal to less formal. With our world becoming more and more digitalised and global, and our trade becoming more international, the focus on international aspects of competition law and policy and a comparative approach to these is crucial and even inevitable.
The International and Comparative Competition Law and Policy Program includes LIDC (International League of Competition Law) scholarly projects and activities, which are aimed at globally important competition-law issues and internationally hot topics on competition law and policy. The Program affiliates the local LIDC Australian members group.
The ‘International and Comparative Competition Law and Policy Program’ will address a wide range of competition-law issues, which have international or comparative characteristics while, in most instances, combining both international and comparative elements. These issues inform the topics of the carefully designed research projects, including LIDC projects.
The Program brings together academics, practitioners, regulators and post-graduate students with the aim of enhancing the knowledge of and practices in competition law and policy and its theories, as well as the areas of law related to competition law within the focus of LIDC.
The carefully selected research projects under this program will lead to high-quality scholarship dealing with internationally significant issues of competition law and beyond. The aim of the projects will be to increase the awareness of these issues, providing solutions and influencing the reform of law, policy and approaches to competition law.
- Sustainable competition law in digital economy
- The notion of ‘power’
- Bargaining power and the rights of consumers and patients
- LIDC Projects
About LIDC
The International League of Competition Law is a longstanding international association created in 1930. It serves as a unique platform for exchanging and developing ideas and knowledge on competition law, intellectual property law and unfair competition law.
LIDC currently comprises 16 national chapters and over 800 members internationally. Its members consist of leading lawyers from private law firms, in-house counsel, regulators and academics. Some national chapters also have undertakings as their members.
LIDC Main Activities
Each year, LIDC holds an international congress that comprises an interesting programme of panels and speaker events, as well as the discussion of two questions related to competition law, intellectual property law and/or unfair competition. Prior to the annual congress, national chapters or individual members are invited to submit a national report on the way in which the particular issue is dealt with in their jurisdiction. These national reports are synthesized into an in-depth international report, which is presented at the annual congress, with proposed recommendations and solutions to the questions debated and voted upon at the General Assembly held at the end of the annual congress.
The national and international reports, together with the resolutions adopted during the General Assembly, are published by Springer and LIDC in a series entitled “LIDC Contributions on Antitrust Law, Intellectual Property and Unfair Competition”, and sent to national and international enforcement authorities.
Additionally, national chapters and individual members also participate in “transnational working groups” to share their knowledge and foster discussion on specific topics of interest and they organize their own, national activities. From time to time, the LIDC submits position papers to the European Commission and other enforcement agencies, as the case may be, on specific issues or commercial practices.
LIDC Book Series
LIDC Contributions on Antitrust Law, Intellectual Property and Unfair Competition.