Antitrust Law and Sustainable Development

The course aims at providing students with a view on the interaction of the two goals of competition and sustainability within the framework of EU antitrust law.

Relevant EU antitrust rules and case law, as well as the underlying basic economic concepts and tools, will be confronted with the emerging need to incorporate within antitrust analysis considerations of "green" or "ethical" features of goods and production processes, the extent they meet consumers' preferences, and the way antitrust enforcement may either provide incentives or obstacles to the pursue of sustainability goals by undertakings.

The course also encourages students to learn through analysis and critical discussion of cases, with a view to stimulating debate on the application of rules to specific factual scenarios, use of argumentation and development of convincing skills.

By the end of this course, students should be able to:
- Understand the various dimensions and implications of the interaction amongst EU Antitrust Law, competition policy and sustainability
- Select, interpret and apply argumentatively the relevant bodies of laws and the relevant precedents to specific cases, in a problem-solving perspective.
- Understand the scope and role of rules, enforcement mechanisms, institutions, making autonomous judgements.
- Use their communication skills (written and oral) to argue convincingly, expressing their knowledge with propriety of language within logical, legal and (basic) economic reasoning.
- Deploy learning skills suitable to continue their education with a high degree of autonomy.