Multi-Jurisdictional Antitrust Enforcement: Introduction

"The articles presented in this section of the journal result from a conference held by the ESRC Centre for Competition Policy in June of this year at the University of East Anglia. The theme of the conference—multi-jurisdictional antitrust enforcement—provoked much interest and discussion from a number of different perspectives. The question of multi-jurisdictional antitrust enforcement goes beyond the often technical jurisdictional rules governing the allocation of cases. In recent times, reform in both the US and the EC has focused on how best to share or delineate competencies as between the upper (federal, supranational) and lower (state, member state) levels. There are no right answers, of course, and allocation will normally represent inherent trade-offs. Delegation to the supranational level, for example, may be necessary in order to prevent the emergence of national champions policy concerns at the domestic level, while it may be the case that decisions are better taken at the local level for both informational and legitimacy reasons. Dilemmas such as these were at the very core of the confer- ence’s theme, and the papers presented here capture most of the areas covered and tensions identified by speakers, discussants and participants."