Evolutionary Antitrust Law and Policy in the Digital Economy
On Monday, February 6, the Strauss Center in conjunction with the Journal of Law and Technology at Texas (JOLTT) will host a presentation and discussion on “Evolutionary Antitrust Law and Policy in the Digital Economy” with Thibault Schrepel, Associate Professor of Law at VU Amsterdam University (Amsterdam Law & Technology Institute) and a Faculty Affiliate at Stanford University CodeX Center, and Nicolas Petit, Joint Chair in Competition Law at the Department of Law and at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies and invited Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges.
Assume a planet with an antitrust-like law whose goal is to promote business change, dynamism, and transformation. What would this antitrust system look like? This paper answers that question by tapping into evolutionary theories. It develops a model of antitrust law whose tenets are entirely different from the paradigm practiced on Earth. It provides the groundwork for developing a new method of analysis, normative foundation, and mode of antitrust intervention. The discussion will be moderated by Chinmayi Sharma, Strauss Scholar in Residence Lecturer at the UT School of Law.
The event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP here. If you have questions, please direct them here: development@jolttx.com.
Biographies
Thibault Schrepel, LL.M., is an Associate Professor of Law at VU Amsterdam University (Amsterdam Law & Technology Institute), and a Faculty Affiliate at Stanford University CodeX Center where he has created the “Computational Antitrust” project that brings together over 60 antitrust agencies. Mr. Schrepel also holds research and teaching positions at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Sciences Po Paris. He is a Harvard University Berkman Center alumnus, a member of the French Superior Audiovisual Council’s scientific board, also, a blockchain expert appointed to the World Economic Forum and the World Bank. He is the Network Law Review’s creator. In 2018, Mr. Schrepel was granted the “Academic Excellence” Global Competition Review Award, which recognizes “an academic competition specialist who has made an outstanding contribution to competition policy.” These last couple of years, he has been focusing most of his research on blockchain antitrust, computational antitrust, and complexity theory. He has written the world’s most downloaded antitrust articles of 2018 (“The Blockchain Antitrust Paradox”), 2019 (“Collusion by Blockchain and Smart Contracts”), 2020 (“Blockchain Code as Antitrust”), 2021 (“Computational Antitrust: An Introduction and Research Agenda”), and 2022 (“Complexity-Minded Antitrust”). His latest book, “Blockchain + Antitrust”, was published in September 2021.
Nicolas Petit is Joint Chair in Competition Law at the Department of Law and at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies. He is also invited Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges. He will be on special leave from the Law School of the University of Liege (ULiege) where he has been full Professor since 2007 and where he received his Phd. Prior to joining the EUI, Professor Petit has held a public office position as a part-time judge with the Belgian competition authority, and has also worked in private practice with a leading US law firm in Brussels. He is the author of Big Tech and the Digital Economy: The Moligopoly Scenario (Oxford University Press, 2019), co-author of EU Competition Law and Economics (Oxford University Press, 2012) and author of Droit européen de la concurrence (Domat Montchrestien, 2013 and 2018), a monograph which was awarded the prize for the best law book of the year at the Constitutional Court in France. In 2005 he was a member of Harvard Law School’s Visiting Researchers Programme. Professor Petit’s work has appeared in numerous journals including the Antitrust Law Journal, the European Law Review, the Review of Industrial Organization, the Columbia Journal of European Law and the Fordham Intellectual Property, Media & Entertainment Law Journal. He is the 44th top ssrn author in the category “Law”. Since 2017 he is a member of the European Commission High Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence.