The aims of EU competition law are contested. The mainstream view that competition law prohibits conduct that harms consumer welfare leads to discussion about the proper economic approach to apply. EU competition law has often been applied in ways that address other public policy considerations, presently focusing on promoting digital markets and a green agenda. The procedures to apply competition law must safeguard the fundamental rights of undertakings and the Court of Justice has helped shape the degree of protection as well as the right to a robust judicial review of Commission decisions. Since 2004, national competition authorities have been tasked with applying EU competition law. Cooperation among national authorities and the Commission is facilitated by the European Competition Network and the ECN+ Directive has conferred on each national competition authorities the same enforcement powers that the Commission enjoys. Each national authority focuses on cases that affect its jurisdiction, the Commission retaining responsibility for cross-border infringements. Private enforcement has been facilitated by the EU legislature and a system of collective redress by which consumers secure compensation is emerging slowly in some jurisdictions.

This section attempts to demonstrate the kind of administrative and legal documents that someone might encounter, or indeed be recorded in, during the course of his life. Here the example of Roger of Montbegon, one of the barons who was appointed to enforce the Magna Carta, is chosen to show how his marriage and his privileges and the estates he owned all over the country led to his name being recorded in a wide variety of different documents. This example should help those studying the period to see what documents need to be consulted to follow the biographical trajectory of individuals of the period.

While company law makes great efforts to maintain the separation of different legal entities, other areas of law increasingly emphasise the common responsibility of corporate groups. One of the fields shaping this emerging principle is competition law, where focusing on the whole group rather than its individual members is increasingly becoming the norm. But this approach is still far from being uniformly accepted. While EU competition law is pushing ahead, US antitrust law is said to take a rather critical stance. Against this background, this chapter examines the functions performed by a unitary perspective on corporate groups. The main goal is to show that at least three important functions must be distinguished in EU competition law, each of which has its own implications. Only when these are properly understood can it be determined where the group perspective is appropriate and where it is not. This is shown by the example of current discussions, for example, on the liability of sister companies and on possible applications in the area of liability for damages. Finally, the analysis in this chapter also aims to contribute to a better understanding of the different approaches in EU and US competition law.

States make decisions to allocate resilience to (or withhold resilience from) stakeholders across these networked interests through the lens of the state’s own vulnerability and resilience needs. We have revealed how the state’s “other-regarding” responsibility to govern in the “collective interest” – allocating resilience to shore up particular (competing) individual, aggregated and/or institutional claims – and the state’s own “self-regarding” need to shore up its resilience vis-à-vis citizens, markets, and society – interact to produce and provoke state responses to squatting. Finally, because Resilient Property analyses seek to explore as much as possible of the “problem space,” we have looked beyond the horizontal scale of national legislation or litigation to investigate how multi-scalar states craft complex solutions to complex problems. This includes tailoring responses to the specific needs and priorities, pressures and strains, commitments and constraints, that come to fore at the local, regional, national or supra-national level. Multilayered responses to squatting allow scope for normative hybridity within state responses to “wicked” property problems, in ways that can support systemic equilibrium. In the first part of this chapter, we reflect on three types of state responses to squatting: (1) property/private law responses; (2) criminal justice/law-and-order responses; and (3) responses deploying other administrative functions of the state. We consider how state responses reflect alignments between state self-interest and selected aspects of the state’s other-regarding responsibilities; and how they contribute (or not) to restoring equilibrium and shoring up the authority and legitimacy of the state in moments of crisis. These national-jurisdiction level legal responses are embedded within a polycentric, multimodal, and multi-scalar matrix. In the second part of the chapter, we examine two city-level case studies: New York City and Barcelona – to reflect on moments in which local- or city-level responses were key to restoring equilibrium, or triggering tipping-points for change.

This chapter examines the implicit-procedural balancing tools, embedded in the exercise of the competition enforcers’ discretion and priority setting powers. Modernisation has entrusted the Commission and NCAs with a new balancing tool in the form of their discretional enforcement powers. Moreover, it has incentivised the Commission and NCAs to direct their enforcement efforts towards clear-cut infringements of Article 101 TFEU, which are unlikely to be justified by overriding non-competition interests. The competition enforcers have used their detection, target, instrument, and outcome discretion to decide not to enforce Article 101 TFEU against other types of agreements even when they do not meet the conditions for an exception under Article 101(1) and (3) TFEU. As a result, investigations into agreements that raised balancing questions were often settled with negotiated remedies or terminated by closing the probe into the case altogether. The chapter investigated various aspects of priority setting, including the selection of a strategy for identifying anti-competitive behaviour; the choice of whether to open an investigation and pursue a case; choice of enforcement instrument (sector regulation, markets-work, informal opinions, and the effect on trade test); and selection of remedies (fines, commitments, and findings of inapplicability).

This chapter examines the implicit-procedural balancing tools, embedded in the exercise of the competition enforcers’ discretion and priority setting powers. Modernisation has entrusted the Commission and NCAs with a new balancing tool in the form of their discretional enforcement powers. Moreover, it has incentivised the Commission and NCAs to direct their enforcement efforts towards clear-cut infringements of Article 101 TFEU, which are unlikely to be justified by overriding non-competition interests. The competition enforcers have used their detection, target, instrument, and outcome discretion to decide not to enforce Article 101 TFEU against other types of agreements even when they do not meet the conditions for an exception under Article 101(1) and (3) TFEU. As a result, investigations into agreements that raised balancing questions were often settled with negotiated remedies or terminated by closing the probe into the case altogether. The chapter investigated various aspects of priority setting, including the selection of a strategy for identifying anti-competitive behaviour; the choice of whether to open an investigation and pursue a case; choice of enforcement instrument (sector regulation, markets-work, informal opinions, and the effect on trade test); and selection of remedies (fines, commitments, and findings of inapplicability).

Competition law sanctions in Japan are described after first dividing the issues into cartels and non-cartels. Regarding non-cartels, although the 2009 Amendment introduced administrative fine systems, there are only a few orders, arguably because the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) tends to avoid orders that addressees would be likely to contest in the courts. As a result, the JFTC stresses the importance of advocacy instead of frequently enforcing the law. In contrast, regarding cartels, the JFTC has repeatedly issued administrative fine orders. The 1977 Amendment introduced the fine system against cartels, and the 2005 Amendment introduced a leniency system. If the violator is either a repeat offender (recidivism) or a cartel ringleader, the fine becomes 1.5 times higher (if both, 2.0 times higher). There are no fining guidelines. Thus far, the sanctions related to cartels seem to work effectively; quite a few cartels seem to have been deterred. The chapter also describes the framework of the 2019 amendment that took effect in December 2020.

The sanction system of China’s anti-monopoly law mainly comprises administrative penalty and civil damages compensation, with administrative penalty as the core sanction method. The mode of administrative penalty combining confiscation of illegal income and fines established in the Anti-monopoly Law is not ideal in practice. Confiscation of illegal income is often absent, which greatly affects the deterrent capacity of anti-monopoly sanctions. At the same time, imposing fines is not a sufficient deterrent on its own. To solve the predicament, in the revision of the Anti-Monopoly Law it is proposed to cancel confiscation of illegal income and learn from the internationally mainstream anti-monopoly administrative punishment mode by integrating the function of confiscation of illegal income in the form of fines, that is, replacing it with the fines-oriented anti-monopoly administrative punishment model, in order to make punishment more certain. In addition, China should reform the anti-monopoly law fine system in order to increase deterrence, including clarifying the meaning of “sales”, abolishing minimum fines of 1%, and considering civil damages as a mitigating factor for fines.

This chapter examines the effectiveness of the administrative fines imposed on cartels by the European Commission. It reviews the theory and practice and evidence that European Commission fines, leniency and settlement procedures deter cartels.

In the past the Netherlands was known for its lenient approach towards anticompetitive behaviour. This slowly changed during the 1990s, and the Netherlands turned into a paradise for competition law litigation. The Dutch Competition Authority (ACM) has multiple tools to combat anticompetitive behaviour. The competition law rules should nowadays be clear for undertakings. Nevertheless, the ACM has over the years been a bit more lenient in sectors where competition law was recently introduced. Fines are an important means to enforce the competition law rules, but the ACM seems to invest much in informal enforcement tools. The ACM is strengthening informal enforcement by, for example, creating guidance papers on different important topics. Informal enforcement can be an efficient way to respond to anticompetitive practices. Compliance with procedural and fundamental rights of undertakings should be safeguarded though. Furthermore, at this point in time, informal enforcement is still conducted on an ad hoc basis and therefore seems not to be based on a clear vision.

Because quality is multidimensional with costs sometimes hard to measure and because many attributes can be quite difficult to verify, both ex ante and ex post, there is a role for a specific intervention on quality of service in regulated industries. The main role of regulation is to minimize the risks of unreliability of services and overinvestment in marketing, and to ensure that pricing is efficient, fair and financially sustainable. These risks are influenced by the specific choice of price regulation. High-powered regimes such as price caps are likely to lead to underinvestment while low-powered regimes such as cost-plus or rate-of-return regulation are likely to lead to overinvestment in quality. To minimize the risks of mistargeting intervention, budgets allocated to quality control and audits have to match the monitoring and enforcement requirements. To reduce information asymmetries, benchmarking, certifications and quality assessments produced from user surveys offer solutions. Fines and penalties to reduce the incentives to cheat must be set to ensure that cost savings linked to non-compliance with quality obligations are at least wiped out.

In 2007, a new Swiss Criminal Code became legally effective in which short prison sentences were to a large extent replaced by income-based day-fines. In addition, flat fines (fixed sums ranging from 1 to 10,000 Swiss francs) became more widely available as additional sanctions. Both fines and day-fines are to be converted into custody if they remain unpaid. Several thousand defendants are affected by such a conversion every year, but no systematic information has been collected on these cases. In order to fill this gap, the Department of Justice of the Canton of Zurich commissioned an evaluation on how often, under what circumstances and against what type of defendants monetary penalties are converted into custody. To this end, 447 case files were analyzed and a sample of 106 defendants serving a monetary sanction in prison were interviewed. Staff members and officials in charge of collecting monetary penalties were also interviewed. The results show that the most defendants serving monetary penalties in prison are confronted with multiple problems of integration. A second group were sentenced to substantial amounts of flat fines or day-fines that they or their networks were unable to pay.

This chapter critically examines the development of the fine and asset forfeiture measures in both the constituent instruments and case law of international(ised) criminal tribunals since Nuremberg. The chapter demonstrates that such procedures have been underutilised in practice, even though many perpetrators of international crimes were, in fact, solvent. While recognising that the origins of international criminal law were chiefly retributive, in light of the fine and asset forfeiture regimes found in the frameworks of a number of international(ised) criminal tribunals, the chapter contends that the Court's fine and asset forfeiture powers were intended by its founders to constitute a vital part of its reparative mandate. The chapter concludes that fine and asset forfeiture powers cannot be viewed as outer limits of international criminal justice, but must rather be seen as foundational to this project.

The practice of criminal justice in western and central Europe was more violent between 1400 and 1600 than before or afterwards, but sensational propaganda produced during this period exaggerates the prevalence of torture and execution. Many criminals evaded justice altogether and most defendants who were caught and brought to trial were subject to quick and relatively merciful justice. Fines, short prison sentences and banishment were far more commonplace than brutally painful execution rituals. As early as the seventeenth century, the practice of both torture and execution declined, the result of changes in Christianity, the growing confidence of secular states, and concerns that inflicting pain was inherently abusive. Enlightenment authors such as Voltaire and Beccaria, who insisted on judicial reform in the late eighteenth century, grossly distorted the actual practice of criminal justice in their own era in ways that have allowed historians to assume that criminal justice in the pre-modern period was more violent than it actually was.