Pier Luigi Parcu, Giorgio Monti and Marco Botta (eds), Private Enforcement of EU Competition Law: The Impact of the Damages Directive
| Date | 01 January 2020 |
| Pages | 159-162 |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2020.0618 |
| Author | |
| Published date | 01 January 2020 |
The enactment of the 2014 Directive aimed at facilitating the bringing of antitrust damages claims (Directive 2014/104/EU, hereinafter referred to as “2014 Directive”) represented a momentous change in the legal landscape governing private competition enforcement in the EU. The 2014 Directive constitutes the point of arrival of intense debate and policy action designed to facilitate the bringing of competition claims in the member states’ courts, by laying down common rules concerning the disclosure of evidence, the scope of joint and several liability for cartel damages and the limits to this liability and limitation periods. It also deals with issues surrounding the availability of a passing-on defence, the quantification of harm and the consequences of non-judicial resolution of competition disputes. The 2014 Directive, therefore, does not answer all the questions arising from the ongoing discussion of the feasibility and effectiveness of private competition enforcement in the EU. In addition, to the extent that its implementation will affect the national civil procedure rules in force in each member state, the Directive's efficacy will be shaped by the status quo of each jurisdiction, potentially leading to different outcomes across the EU.
The collection edited by Parcu, Monti and Botta is very timely in this context, since it aims to analyse many of the questions arising from the enactment and the implementation of the 2014 Directive. The collection gathers together the proceeds of the 2016 edition of the project “European Networking and Training for National Competition Enforcers” (ENTraNCE), a programme seeking to build capacity through training members of the judiciaries of the member states in the field of competition law. The 2016 sessions covered a number of aspects of the debate surrounding private competition enforcement. The collection comprises nine chapters and is ideally divided in two parts: chapters one to four deal with some general questions arising from competition litigation that are related to the implementation of the Directive. Chapters five to nine, instead, address issues stemming from the impact of the 2014 Directive on the laws of several member states, namely England and Wales, the Netherlands, Spain, France and some of the Central and Eastern European countries.
Chapter one provides a very useful and clear outline of the collection. After providing a synthesis of the background to the work and summarising the key threads of the impact of the 2014 Directive on the member states’ procedural rules, the chapter delves into more general considerations relating to the trends that appear to emerge from the implementation process. These are extremely helpful to the reader since they prelude many of the themes addressed in the following chapters.
Chapter two addresses some...
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