The Future of the Court of Justice in EU Competition Law

Abstract

This article offers perspectives on the future role of the Court of Justice in competition law matters. It first predicts that due to several institutional, sub- stantive and procedural idiosyncrasies, the Court’s ‘rule-making’ function should gain further importance. The resurgence of preliminary references that landed before the Court in recent years brings support to this prediction. In turn, this article argues that with this role, comes the heightened responsibility of setting the ‘right’ competition law standard. Given the lack of readily available, objective benchmark to distinguish what makes good and bad law, the paper offers thoughts on the necessity to set ‘consistent’ competition law standards, and explores several facets of rule-making consistency in EU competition law.