Volume 17, Issue 1

5 posts

THE U.S. AND E.U. APPROACHES TO COMPETITION LAW–CONVERGENT OR DIVERGENT PATHS?

17 Colum. J. Eur. L. 101 (2010) Kfir Abutbul, J.D., Columbia Law School, 2010; LL. B., University College London, Faculty of Laws, 2010. The U.S.  and E.U  competition regulation regimes, or antitrust regulation, as the regime is known in the U.S.,  serve as the global leaders of competition compliance enforcement. Many of their developments percolate to other competition regulation regimes, and any cross-border transaction will usually require in depth knowledge of the enforcement regulations in either of these jurisdictions, if not both. Most importantly, international counsel must be able to assess enforcement trends and make a judgment on the efficiency of cross border enforcement in transactions that span markets. Local interests outside […]

AN E.U. PERSPECTIVE ON NEW VERSUS TRADITIONAL MINORITIES: ON SEMI-INCLUSIVE SOCIO-ECONOMIC INTEGRATION AND EXPANDING VISIONS OF “EUROPEAN” CULTURE AND IDENTITY

17 Colum. J. Eur. L. 57 (2010) Kristin Henrard, Professor of Minority Protection and Associate Professor of Constitutional Law and Human Rights at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Notwithstanding the absence of an explicit minority policy for internal purposes, it is possible to identify the gradual emergence of a minority-conscious implementation of non-minority specific E.U.  policies (non-discrimination, social inclusion, integration, human rights, and cultural diversity). Nevertheless, this is not equally strong in all policy domains. It is argued here that a clear difference emerges between the approaches towards minorities, in particular towards new, immigrant minorities, in terms of  socioeconomic integration (the socio-economic sphere) on the one hand and in terms of […]

TUNNELING: THE EFFECT-AND THE CA USE-OF BAD CORPORATE LAW

17 Colum. J. Eur. L. 23 (2010) Tomas Richter, Of Counsel, Clifford Chance LLP, Prague; Lecturer, Institute of Economic Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague. Between the years 1996  and 2006,  the Czech parliament and supreme court, in an attempt to protect shareholders from the consummation of private benefits of control, essentially shifted the agency costs embedded in internal governance of corporations from the corporations’ outside shareholders to the corporations’ counterparties. In this article, I hypothesize that this idiosyncratic outcome came about as an ill-considered, knee-jerk reaction to the asset-stripping excesses, often dubbed “tunneling,” that resulted from the country’s voucher privatization scheme in the early 1990s. To test the hypothesis, I compare-against […]

EMBEDDING EMPLOYMENT RIGHTS IN EUROPE

17 Colum. J. Eur. L. 1 (2010) Franck Lecomte, Teaching Fellow, Labour Studies Institute, Lyon, France; Ph. D. Candidate, European University Institute, Florence, Italy. The most recent European employment law saga arising from Viking, Laval,  and subsequent decisions has commonly been understood as perpetuating the infiltration of economic provisions into labor legislation. It has also been asserted, however, that these cases contain contradictory arguments, which offer a multifaceted narrative. The new construction ofArticle 151 TFEU (ex Article 136 EC)  is of particular interest. Considered to be the cornerstone of European employment policy, this provision had generally been regarded as programmatic. During the past few years, however, it has progressively metamorphosed into a substantive rule […]