Tuesday 25 October 2022 1:00pm to 2:00pm
Faculty of Law, G24
About
Speaker: Professor Wolfgang Wurmnest (University of Hamburg)
Held in collaboration with CELS.
Over the last decades, private enforcement of competition (antitrust) law has picked up significantly in the UK and Europe. Most cases concern follow-on actions for damages against cartel members for infringements of Art. 101 TFEU and/or respective national prohibitions. Whereas early judgments have clarified issues of international jurisdiction and the general prerequisites for such claims, more recent cases deal with the quantification of harm caused by cartels to individual plaintiffs. From a theoretical perspective, assessing the cartel overcharge is a rather straightforward mathematical operation. Put simply, the overcharge is to be calculated on the basis of a comparison of the prices under cartel conditions and those prices that would have been charged absent the anticompetitive agreement. In practice, however, courts face a multitude of challenges when trying to quantify antitrust damages. One of the key questions is whether the assessment must be grounded on economic expert opinions or whether courts can freely estimate the amount of damages. The talk will discuss the approaches taken by different courts in the UK and Europe and will focus on the role of economic experts.
Biography:
Wolfgang Wurmnest is a full professor of law at the University of Hamburg since 2021. Previously he served as a full professor at the Universities of Augsburg (2013–2021) and Hanover (2009–2013), and as a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Private International and Comparative Law, Hamburg (2004–2008). He was a visiting scholar in Foggia, Lyon, Hanoi and (from September 2022 onwards) Cambridge. His main fields of research are comparative and international tort and competition law.
3CL runs the 3CL Travers Smith Lunchtime Seminar Series, featuring leading academics from the Faculty, and high-profile practitioners.
Enquiries to: 3cl@law.cam.ac.uk