Archive for the ‘Jokes’ Category
Our very own disclaimer
After reading the post written by Nicolas on Friday, I realized that we need a disclaimer too. Here it is:
The views reflected in our posts do not necessarily represent the views of Chilling Competition or of its authors. They merely reflect the thoughts that crossed our minds at the exact date and time that appears under each post. Those thoughts may actually be radically opposite to the ones that crossed our minds on the following second.
– If anyone feels offended or dislikes any of our posts, then we suggest that you assume that our opinion has evolved since the date of publication and that we have embraced more reasonable opinions.
– If, on the other hand, you like what we say, we recommend that you assume that since our opinions were sound, we will not have felt the need to change them.
Disclaimer
We have already talked of the Commission’s somewhat confusing disclaimers in official documents.
Think of §3 of the Guidance Communication on exclusionary abuses under Article 102 TFEU : “This document is not intended to constitute a statement of the law”
Or of the good old “The opinions expressed in this document are those of the author and do not represent the views of the European Commission nor of its services“.
Antitrust lawyers often make jokes about the Commission for those disclaimers. But should they?
During the consultation process on the settlement notice, a famous law firm inserted this courageous, delicious footnote in its position paper:
“These comments do not represent the views of the Firm or of its clients.”
So whose views are these? Please help me, because I am lost.
I am even more puzzled given that a few lines above, the same document explicitly mentioned that:
“These comments are offered by the Brussels office of __ & __ LLP in response to the Commission’s invitation to comment.”
Given our track record on this blog, we cannot be suspected of trying to stigmatize this particular law firm. We have very good friends there and they are all stellar professionals.
This is just to show that no one’s perfect in this business, and that it is quite easy to make fun of those who make fun.
PS: Thanks to my assistant N. Neyrinck for the pointer.
PS2: In a paper written with my esteemed colleague Miguel Rato (Shearman & Sterling), we stressed that regardless of those disclaimers, oral statements may to some extent limit the enforcement discretion of the Commission and, as a result, be relied upon by affected parties to challenge a formal Commission decision. In Case T-25/99, Roberts and Roberts v. Commission, the GC for instance reviewed the substance of a public speech given by a Commission official on specific aspects of the application of competition law to pub contracts (§§128-129).
PS3: Picture taken from a very good LP, if you do like post grunge music.
And the answer is….
Las Siete Partidas, passed by Alfonso X, El Sabio (1265) [Alfonso “The Wise”].
Congrats to Tatiana Siakka, David Mamane, Andrey, and Lorenzo Climenti! (Nico: you can afford 4 beers, right?)
Here is an explanation extracted from their answers:
Title 7 within Law 2 of the Fifth Partida, entitled “Of the shortages and bids that merchants create between themselves through oats and guilds” was the legal provision prohibiting traders from engaging in price-fixing and output restriction.
The Code was elaborated in Spain (Castile), but it was in force in Latin America until the modern codification movement (1822–1916). Until the beginning of the 19th century, they were even in effect in the parts of the United States, such as Louisiana, California or Nevada, that had previously belonged to the Spanish empire and used civil law. Furthermore, they served as the legal foundation for the formation of the governing juntas that were established in both Spain and Spanish America after the imprisonment of King Fernando VII during the Peninsular War.
Below you will find a scanned version of the relevant part by courtesy of José Luis Buendía.
[The text appears in Spanish and Latin. Since the short bios available at Brussels-based law firms suggest that all competition lawyers are fluent in practically every language, we trust that many of you will be able to understand it 😉 ]
P.S. Could someone please edit wikipedia´s entry for History of Competition Law?
A (kinda tricky) quizz
If we asked you what was the first antitrust legislation ever in force in part of the territory of what is now the United States you would probably respond that it was the Sherman Act.
This answers is wrong.
What then was the first antitrust law ever in force in America??
We can give you two hints: (i) it was drafted in the 13th century; (ii) the person who promoted its drafting is one of the 23 lawmakers depicted in the marble bas-reliefs of the House of Representatives chamber of the United States Capitol.
Our quizz will be open for 24 hours. You can submit your answers either as comments to this post (they won´t be made public until tomorrow) or via email to alfonso.lamadrid@garrigues.com (I anticipate that I won´t be able to reply; actually, the reason why we´re posting a quizz is because these are busy -and fun- times at work).
Those who get the answer right are entitled to a free beer.
P.S. Since, as you know, “free” products are rarely ever free, the beer will be paid by Nicolas, who doesn´t yet know about it 😉
An”toy”trust
It was reported yesterday that construction toy manufacturer Mega Brands has lodged a federal antitrust complaint against its competitor Lego in order to “stop Lego’s illegal efforts to monopolize the construction toy market through illegal anti-competitive practices including, but not limited to, use of fraudulently obtained IP [intellectual property] rights to interfere with Mega Brands’ right to continue to import certain competitive products [cylindrical studs] into the United States.”
More information is available here. The original complaint is available here.
PS. The picture above is supposed to be one of a Lego Courtroom, although I´m a bit confused by the cook handing a pizza to one of the strangely-dressed members or the Jury…
I wish I was…
During a recent conversation with a Judge, he mentioned that he felt envious of competition agencies (we were talking about the European Commission) because they could easily behave in a “schizophrenic” way, taking one stance in one case and a completely different one in another. He argued that courts are much more concerned about respecting their own precedents (as I pointed out, there are also some nuances to this view) than competition authorities are. In my view, there is a lot of truth to this statement; competition enforcers do not feel bound by their decisional practice because the Court has endorsed the view that each case must be dealt with in light of its specific circumstances. Moreover, progressive interpretations of the law (notably with regard to unilateral behavior) show that some national competition authorities as well as the European Commission do not necessarily feel obliged to follow the case-law neither. To a certain extent, much of this could be understood, but only provided that adequate reasoning is offered to justify that the circumstances merit a change of approach. Sadly, this is not always the case (although, to be fair, the Courts are not a paradigm of transparency when they overrule their previous case-law neither). I´m sure you can think of quite a few examples of radical unexplained shifts.
This conversation made an idea spring to mind: we should ask you who or what (within the antitrust world; yeah, we know, that´s pretty limited, but..) do you wish you were?
Here are a couple of ideas to get the ball rolling:
– I wish I was one of those economists who can say “this is an economic model that we developed for this particular case“. I´m waiting for the day when I can say “this is a legal principle that we developed for this particular case“!.
– I wish I was NOT the lawyer (or rather the former lawyer, I suppose) of the Austrian company that has requested a preliminary ruling from the ECJ on whether having obtained wrong legal advice can exempt a company from responsibility…
Anyone else?
Christmas miscellanea
We will be closing the shop for a few days, but there are a few things that we would like to tell you first:
– Our personal Christmas wishlists appear in a special issue from Competition Policy International. They´ve done a great job with editing our pictures (“thanks” to all those of you who have written to say that I need to change the one I use for these things), and we´re grateful for having been placed in such good company. I´m also grateful for the opportunity to do some free advertising of my family´s bakery: thanks to this they will now start seeing some usefulness to my job! Nicolas also profited from this occassion to make it (more) evident that he´s a competition law freak geek.
– Nicolas and I had some pre-holiday drinks last night together with some good friends. Not only all of us were competition lawyers, but the place we went to was also packed with competition lawyers from a well-known firm. We´ll keep the name of the firm confidential, but we can give you a hint: what do you see in the second row of the image below? 😉
– Many other lawyers in Brussels and elsewhere are also getting some last-minute Christmas gifts. Our thoughts will be with all those who, like our friend David Henry, will have to be stuck at the office with a merger filing…
– The Spanish CNC also received a Christmas gift the day before yesterday, when the names of the members of the new Spanish government were made public. The new minister for the economy is Luis de Guindos, who was the Secretary General for Competition between 1996 and 2002. The CNC is certainly poised to play an important role in the coming years as Spain makes an effor to boost competitiveness. (By the way, the CNC has joined the list of national competition authorities resorting to animated cartoons to explain their job and the benefits of competition. Check it out here).
– A reminder of some events coming up right after the holidays: Nicolas will be opening the new edition of the IEB´s Competition Law Course in Madrid on 13 January (we´ll profit from our visit to Madrid to plot a couple of interesting projects on which we´ll report right after the holidays). The BSC will also be holding a very interesting conference on “Costs in Competition Law” on 25 January.
– A light piece of Christmas reading: Freedom to Trade and the Competitive Process by A. Edlin and J. Farrell. This short article is perhaps the most insightful paper I´ve read in a long time. It´s cool to see two top-notch U.S. economists saying sensible stuff that in Europe would be received with the worst of all insults: Ordoliberal!
– Finally, we want to thank whoever had the idea of improving the search tool in the webpage of the European Court of Justice. You made our lives easier.
– To be frank, there were more issues on which I was planning to comment, but I need to run to the airport…Merry Christmas to all and our best wishes for 2012!!
P.S. We leave you with the image of the European Union´s Christmas tree:
The laugh test
A prominent practitioner once explained to me the usefulness of the “laugh test” (a.k.a. “red face test”) in our profession. He said that lawyers often have to defend arguments about which they are not very confident, but that there should be a limit to the “originality” of these arguments. According to him, this limit could only be drawn with the aid of the laugh test.
The practical instructions are easy: whenever you come up with what you fear to be a far-fetched argument, ask yourself the following question: will the addressee of the argument in question have a laugh when she/he reads it? If the answer is no, you may as well give it a try. If the answer is yes, then you´re better off keeping it to yourself.
Sounds easy, right? If you´d read some decisions and submissions that I´ve been reading this week you´d realize that not everyone applies the laugh test properly!
Since I can´t talk about the examples that are currently on my desk, I will refer to a case that´s being heard today in the U.S. in which it appears legitimate to ask whether the laugh test has been applied or not.
Take a look at this piece (Price-fixing or good manners? Jury might decide) and reach your own conclusion 😉
Economic advice for Christmas shopping
This morning, as I was doing a some last-minute airport shopping for a “Secret Santa” gift for my firm´s Christmas dinner in Brussels tonight, I received an email announcing that Frontier Economics has released a paper on the economics of Christmas. It wasn´t so useful for me because I had severe budget constraints, but it has the sort of fun approach that we like, and we thought you might find it useful or at least entertaining. As they explain on their web page:
It’s easier to think of economists as the prophets of trading doom than as Santa’s little helpers – too busy telling everybody what’s happening to productivity, energy demand and like-for-like sales to provide any insights into the annual exchange of goodwill and good-or-ill gifts to family and friends. So Frontier Economics has been scouring the academic literature of behavioural economics for tips to make that last struggle with your present list a little easier…
If interested in economic advice for Christmas shopping, click here: Present values- The economics of Christmas.
And if you´re one of those who likes to “shop around” for the best deals, you can also check out Waldfogel´s seminal paper on this matter (which Nicolas already recommended last year) and The New York Times´ collection of stories about the economics of Christmas.
By the way, this week is a nervous time for competition lawyers all over Brussels waiting to see if their Christmas break will be wiped out by unexpected Christmas gifts from the Commission!
P.S. This morning we crossed the 200.000 visits threshold. Once again, thank you for taking the time to read us!
Do economists do it with models?
Things are busy at work, and I just remembered that I told Nicolas I would take care of posting something today. When such things happen we generally resort to either (a) announcing a conference; or (b) posting a quick joke.
In this case, if I had chosen a) the post would´ve looked too short; but if I´d chosen b) I would be missing an opportunity for self promotion to announce an interesting event. Solution: let´s do both:
(a) Conference announcement: As anticipated last week, Giorgio Monti has put together a most interesting workshop that will be held next Tuesday (6 December) at the European University Institute. The program -which features Giorgio Monti (EUI), Saskia King (LSE), Luis Ortiz Blanco (Garrigues), Eric Gippini-Fournier (European Commission´s Legal Service) and myself- is available here: What is happening to Article 101 TFEU?
(b) Joke of the day: Economists don´t do it with models. The picture above (which I first saw in a ppp by Fréderic Jenny at Fordham last September) stands for the proposition that economists do it with models “because there´s no shortage of demand for the curves that they supply“.
Nonetheless, as you all know, economic theory can be used to defend one thing and its contrary. That is why there´s an alternative economic theory that explains why economists don´t do it with models. If you want to know about it, click here.
Chillin'Competition 