UCL Centre for Law, Economics and Society

Dr Ioannis Lianos, founder and director of the Centre for Law, Economics & Society at UCL was awarded one of the five annual Philip Leverhulme prizes for his leading research on the interaction between economics and the law.

Dr Lianos' research will focus on important dimensions of this interaction, such as the role of economic analysis in public policy decision-making, judicial scrutiny of economic analysis, the emergence of forensic economics and the role of economists in the legal process.

Dr Ioannis Lianos was one of the international specialists on competition law and intellectual property invited to speak at the first "Open Innovations" Forum that was held in Moscow from 31 October to 3 November 2012.

The Moscow International Forum for Innovative Development «Open Innovations» is a global discussion platform dedicated to the advanced technologies and perspectives of the international cooperation in the sphere of innovations. The Forum serves to strengthen international collaboration with the aim of creating the innovation leaders’ club. Dr Lianos contributed to two panels of the international forum on the appropriate design of intellectual property regimes and the interaction between competition policy and intellectual property.

The workshop explored both the law and economies of vertical restraints and in particular resale price maintenance in Europe and the US.

Discussions focused on the application of competition law in various contexts, including selective distribution and commercial agency agreements. Visit the event website for more information.

Distinguished Professor William S. Comanor from the University of California explored how the pharmaceutical industry has encountered a period of dramatic structural change.

While industry leaders explain their mergers as a response to these shocks and a partial solution to the declining productivity problem, the lecture advanced the reverse hypothesis: that instead of enhancing R&D productivity, the merger wave has jeopardized it. The speaker emphasized the uncertainties inevitably encountered in new drug discovery and development and the role of "parallel paths", i.e. the pursuit of multiple approaches to solving any given medical problem, in coping with those uncertainties. Visit the event website for more information.

This was the second jointly organised conference on Brands, Competition and the Law - the first was held at UCL in December 2011, the result of a collaboration between the CLES and the Institute of Consumer and Antitrust Studies at the Loyola University of Chicago.

The aim of this second conference was to reflect on the legal, business, and economic understanding of brands by explaining what brands are, how they function, and the role brands play in business competition. The conference also delved into specific issues raised by branding in the 21st century business competition, such as the challenges raised by online business and the increasing role of private labels in distribution.

The interaction of competition law with sports and the specificity of this area have been examined in the CLES's lecture on "Sport and Competition law: Recent developments and unfinished business". 

PhD Candidate and Teaching Fellow Despoina Mantzari has been invited to conduct a two hour workshop at the University of Brescia (Italy) on judicial review of economic evidence in EU Courts (case study and discussion of selected national and/or European cases relevant from the point of view of EU Competition Law).

CLES fellow and PhD candidate Deni Mantzari attended the 4th biennial ECPR standing group for regulatory governance conference on 27-29 June 2012 at the University of Exeter. Despoina presented a paper entitled "A Complementary Relationship? The Judge and the Agency in the Realm of Economic Regulation.".

A new book edited by Dr Ioannis Lianos has been published.

The Global Limits of Competition Law
Ioannis Lianos and Daniel Sokol (Co-Editors)
Stanford University Press, June 2012

Dr Ioannis Lianos, Director of the CLES and Co- Director of the Institute of Global Law, and Mr Martin Adams, a UCL alumnus and associate at international law firm Kirkland & Ellis LLP in New York, were invited to speak at the 2nd St Petersburg International Legal Forum. The forum was held under the auspices of the Russian Presidency at the State Hermitage in St Petersburg on May 16-19 2012.