Chillin'Competition

In the course of the past few days and weeks some friends have asked us to advertise a few upcoming Competition-related happenings. We’ve taken our time, but here’s a compilation of stuff worth knowing about:

The 3rd edition of Concurrence’s Antitrust Writing Awards is now ongoing.  You can vote for your favorite piece before the 1^st of March.

Harvard’s European Law Association (HELA) has scheduled its first Antitrust conference, to be held on 24 March. It will deal with the informal application of  competition law in the U.S. and the EU. Click here to check out the call for papers and to find out more info: Hela_Call_Abstracts_updated (and apologies to Zena Prodromou for not having done this before!)

On 30 January the ABA’s Section of Antitrust Law will be holding a networking reception + a panel (Inquiries into Competition and Alleged Misconduct in UK Financial Services) in London. Click here for more info.

The annual junior competition lawyer’s conference will take place on 31 January. This is an initiative that we’ve always supported and that would be nice to see replicated in places other than the UK. Click here for more info.

And also on 31 January we will be hosting the first seminar within the competition law course that Luis Ortiz Blanco and I co-direct in Madrid. It will be devoted to Recent developments regarding the application of Article 101 TFEU (including damage claims, anti-competitive agreements in the pharma industry and the fight against cartels in a context of economic crisis), and will feature Fernando Castillo de la Torre (EC’s Legal Service), Eric Gippini Fournier (EC’s Legal Service), (Carlos III University, EAGCP and CEPR), Mario Mariniello (Bruegel), Helmut Brokelmann (MLAB), Maria Luisa Tierno (DG Comp), Natalia Fabra (Universidad Carlos III, EAGCP), Flor Castilla (EC’s Legal Service), Borja Martínez (Uría Menéndez), Antonio Martínez (Allen&Overy), Jesús Alfaro (Linklaters) and Gerald Miersch (DG Comp). I’ll post the final program here as soon as it’s ready.

Very importantly, a reminder is in order: on February 7-8 AIJA and the College of Europe will be holding the not-to-be-missed conference Antitrust 2.0 Competition Law and Technology.

P.S. We’ve also been asked to mention that the Swedish Competition Authority is taking steps to publish decisions in English. Our source suggests to present this as one of the major 10 developments on the year, which I’m a bit hesitant to do 😉 However, the Swede’s move is commendable, particularly when compared to what other national competition authorities do (the new Spanish authority doesn’t even have an English version for its webpage…)