Brandeis in Brussels : Regulated Competition and Economic Coordination in the European Union

In recent years, neo-Brandeisian legal scholars have revived the ideas of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis who championed state regulation that preserved market competition and economic liberty in the face of concentrated private power. While the resulting intellectual ferment has opened up important new space for debate, discussion has so far concentrated almost entirely on the United States. In this paper, we argue that American reformers can draw important lessons from the European experience with competition regulation. We show that many of Brandeis’ ideas were shaped by early European approaches to market governance and that EU competition law came to embody core features of the system that Brandeis once envisioned for the US. For those seeking to restore the American anti-monopoly tradition, much can be learned by examining how the EU arrived at a competition regime that regulates unfair competition while permitting ‘healthy’ coordination in the face of common challenges