Over 90 percent of antitrust litigation in the United States is filed by private plaintiffs, sometimes as class actions, and always seeking treble damages. As Judge Douglas Ginsburg and Leah Brannon have observed in these pages, such cases have been the source of most of the fodder that the courts have used to develop the precedents that constitute antitrust U.S. law. The situation has been far different in the European Community where the rights of private action have been limited, class actions largely unknown, and multiple damages uncommon. In the last few years several of the EC countries have embraced or considered adopting some aspects of private rights of action for violations of the competition laws, especially for the recovery of damages.
Most recently the European Commission issued its White Paper on antitrust damage actions. The move in the EC towards private litigation for violation of the antitrust laws, and the issues and challenges this presents, begins the Autumn 2008 issue of CPI. The symposium consists of articles by authors from several different parts of the competition policy community: Christopher Cook, Vincent Smith, Assimakis Komninos, and Renato Nazzini & Ali Nikpay. Thus far, private actions in Europe have mainly followed from the findings of a competition authority that a company participated in a cartel. It is thus fitting that we turn to two articles concerning collusion. The first, by Malcolm Coate, reports the result of an empirical study of
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