Competition Law 2.0: Forging A New Paradigm in a Crisis-Driven World

About the conference

This is the second conference in the series of the Cambridge/UCL Competition Law and Policy Hub launched in 2024

The world faces an unprecedented convergence of crises—from COVID-19 and climate change to inflation, digitalization, AI, rising inequality, drastic innovation and geopolitical upheaval. This perfect storm of challenges has created a complex web of regulatory issues for the EU, UK, and countries worldwide. These interconnected problems demand from governments and firms innovative and flexible solutions that can address multiple crises simultaneously. Competition law and associated regulations form a crucial pillar in our collective effort to foster economic dynamism, enhance consumer and more broadly citizens’ interests, preserve market pluralism, and ensure resilience.

The Cambridge-UCL Competition Law and Policy Hub is organising its 2nd annual workshop ‘Competition Law 2.0: Forging A New Paradigm in a Crisis-Driven World’, aimings at engaging with groundbreaking scholarship on the current and future challenges of competition law. We are showcassing unpublished academic papers, early career researchers’ papers (e.g. PhD thesis chapters), and early project ideas with nine panels across the two days exploring:

• Shaping the Digital Future
• Competition Law, Industrial Policy and Power
• Exploitation – Fair Prices
• Mergers
• Digital Competition Law & AI
• Re-imagining competition law (Adjudication)
• Competition Law, sustainability and the internal market
• Optimal enforcement theory, fundamental rights and ethics: do the ends justify the means?
• Competition Law and its stakeholders

And two special panels on:

• 2nd UCL Competition Law and Policy Book Fest
• Polycentric Competition Law: Looking Back, Moving the Agenda Forward

With this workshop will provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of groundbreaking research on new approaches, concepts, tools and themes in competition law scholarship that will make an impact in a fast-changing world. We are eager to involve junior and mid-career researchers based in the UK or in the EU in order to present their recent research that fits the overall theme of the conference. In this regard, there will be a session devoted to early career researchers.

Each session will be an interactive discussion that will involve a short presentation of the papers by their authors, discussion by a commentator and time for a Q&A session with the audience.

Programme

The full programme will be available soon.