Chillin'Competition

On 20 March the Global Competition Law Center will be holding its 68th lunch talk. The topic is the 2014 Communication on the notion of State Aid, and the speakers Vittorio di Bucci (Director at the EC’s Legal Service), Nicola Pesaresi (Head of Unit, DG Comp) and my colleague/boss José Luis Buendía (Partner at Garrigues). You can register (this is an interesting, brief and cheap one: 30 euros) via this website.

The Institute for European Studies at the VUB in Brussels will be starting a series of lectures on the role of national competition law and national competition authorities. The inauguaral lecture will be delivered by Alexander Italianer (Director General at DG Comp) on 21 March at 12. More info is available here.

Also on 21 March there will be a seminar on the application of competition law by judges and arbitrators (in Madrid and in Spanish, though), organized within the framework of the course that Luis Ortiz and myself co-direct there.

On 3 April ERA will be hosting an afternoon workshop on Two sided markets in merger and abuse of dominance cases here in Brussels featuring Thomas Graf (Cleary Gottlieb), Lars Wiethaus (E.CA Economics) and myself. This is not to be missed. The program is available here: Two Sided Markets in Merger and Abuse of Dominance Cases (ERA)

The 21st St.Gallen International Competition Law Forum ICF (“Current issues and developments in competition law“) will be held on May 15th and 16th 2014. Even though for some odd reason we haven’t been invited to speak there (which obviously lowers the quality of any event 😉 ) we acknowledge that the speaker line-up is otherwise quite impressive. Further information including a detailed programme are available on the conference website: http://www.sg-icf.ch/.

Last but not least, the book Comparative Private Enforcement and Collective Redress Across the EU, edited by Barry Rodger, is just out. Looks quite promising.

P.S. And speaking of ads, I’ve just checked Chillin’Competition’s ad-related earnings and we get approximately $4 per month (which is slightly below my hourly rate) for approximately 25,000 monthly visits. We have high aspirations, though, and, I tell you, one day we’ll be getting enough to pay for at least two monthly beers.