Christopher Townley and “Co-ordinated Diversity: Revolutionary Suggestions for EU Competition Law (and for EU Law too)”
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On June 5th, 2014 Dr. Christopher Townley, senior lecturer at the Faculty of Law of King’s College, London, was invited by our Research Group to held a talk about his recent paper entitled “Co-ordinated Diversity: Revolutionary Suggestions for EU Competition Law”.[1]
In his talk, Dr. Townley challenged the traditional view that EU competition rules should apply uniformly across all Member States. He argued that in the application of Article 101 TFEU National Competition Authorities should enjoy of a margin of freedom giving leeway to diversity in accordance with the national situations. It was put forward that by embracing this limited degree of diversity EU competition law will enrich itself from the comparative and distinct approaches to the application of the law.
Dr. Townley, however, made the disclaimer that the too much diversity is also negative as it leads to issues relate to legal uncertainty and lack of uniformity across Member States, power distribution issues, “forum shopping” and insertion of other values not part of EU competition law.
Lastly, Townley’s paper suggests using the European Competition Network as the forum to coordinate this limited diversity in the application of EU Competition law and even to apply a similar model to other areas of EU law.
After his presentation, the members Research Group and Dr. Townley engaged in a vivid and interesting conversation discussing not only aspects related to his paper but EU competition law in general and strengthening ties between our Research Group and King’s Competition Law group.
[1] Townley, Christopher, Co-ordinated Diversity: Revolutionary Suggestions for EU Competition Law (and for EU Law too) (July 26, 2013). (2014) 33 Yearbook of European Law 1; King's College London Law School Research Paper No. 2014-13. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2298588 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2298588.
