Free Movement of Judgments: Increasing Deterrence of International Cartels through Jurisdictional Reliance

Posted by D. Daniel Sokol

The UCL Institute of Global Law and the UCL Centre for Law and Economics are delighted to present a lecture by

Prof. Michal Gal, Haifa University

on

Free Movement of Judgments:
Increasing Deterrence of International Cartels through Jurisdictional Reliance

Chair: Dr Ioannis Lianos, UCL Faculty of Laws

Wednesday 3 March 2010, 5-6 p.m.

Accredited with 1 CPD hour by the SRA and BSB.

About this lecture:
This lecture challenges the conventional wisdom that not much can be done under the existing atomistic system of antitrust enforcement to solve the problem of sub-optimal deterrence of international cartels. 

Low deterrence results from two main facts: first, international cartels are generally prosecuted by only a fraction of the jurisdictions harmed by them. Second, monetary sanctions imposed by those jurisdictions are generally based only on the harm incurred to their domestic markets.

To solve this problem, this lecture proposes a novel legal tool that would enable countries to adopt and rely upon foreign findings of international hard-core cartels, provided that the foreign decisions meet criteria that ensure that such reliance is reasonable and fair. As elaborated, this free movement of judgments holds potential to overcome the main obstacles to efficient deterrence and to significantly increase both domestic as well as global welfare. Its costs can be overcome to a great extent by designing appropriate solutions. The political implications are also not prohibitive. As shown, jurisdictions already rely on foreign judgments that do not significantly differ from the decisions at hand.

About the speaker:
Professor Michal Gal is vice-dean of the Faculty of Law, Haifa University, Director of the Law and MBA Program, and Co-Director of the Forum on Law and Markets at the Faculty of Law, Haifa University, Israel. She is a Global Hauser Visiting Professor, NYU School of Law and Dean's Visiting Professor at Georgetown University (2007-8) and will be a Visiting Professor at the University of Melbourne, Australia, in 2009. She was also a visiting scholar at Columbia University School of Law. Dr. Gal's research focuses on competition law and policy. She is the author of the book Competition Policy for Small Market Economies (Harvard University Press, 2003) and main author and co-editor of The Law and Economics of Israeli Competition Law (Nevo, 2007, Hebrew). She also published many scholarly articles on competition law issues, including oligopoly pricing, the conditions for antitrust in developing economies, the political economy of antitrust, and the globalization of antitrust. She gave talks and presented papers in numerous conferences and colloquiums. Dr. Gal served as a consultant to several international organizations (e.g. OECD, UNCTAD) on issues of competition law in small and developing economies and is a non-governmental advisor of the International Competition Network (ICN). She also advised several small economies on the framing of their competition laws. Dr. Gal received her J.S.D. and LL.M. in law from the University of Toronto. Both her thesises won the Alan Marks Medal for best thesis. She received her LL.B. from Tel Aviv University, magna cum laude, and clerked in the Israeli Supreme Court. Dr. Gal has won many grants and prizes for her research, including the Zeltner award for young researcher in 2004 and the GIF for young scientist, 2006. She also won several teaching awards.