Oxford Business Law Blog

For years, the extent of patent rights of a patentee after sale of a patented product has been the subject of much judicial debate. This is especially so as the resolution of this issue required the...

One of the historical mysteries of modern UK company law was its sudden emergence. The passage of statutes in 1855 and 1856 transformed one of the strictest company law regimes into among Europe’s...

The increasing pace of FinTech development has triggered a worldwide race among policy makers to overhaul their own regulatory landscape in order to be as innovation friendly as possible...

The ‘invisible hand’ has become an icon for an economic philosophy which assumes that a laissez-faire governmental policy will result in optimal social and financial outcomes as market forces will...

Is common ownership the Doomsday Machine for the operation of free markets, competition and capitalism as we know it? An observer of cutting-edge law and economics literature may indeed tend to...

With the UK’s planned exit from the European Union on March 29, 2019 looming and the likelihood of an exit without a withdrawal agreement (a so-called 'No Deal' Brexit) increasingly probable, merging...

The UK’s reviews of the Big Four auditing firms have largely adopted an approach of more regulation and government oversight. This approach is not an unnatural response in the face of the evidence...

Our forthcoming article focuses on the regulation of unfair trading practices (‘UTPs’) in the food supply chain. This topic has been on the EU’s policy agenda since 2009 when the European Commission...

A recent criminal cartel case where sellers of posters used an algorithm to coordinate their prices on the Amazon platform created buzz in the competition community. While interesting with regard to...

The rapid evolution of the digital economy holds many promises. At the same time, the rise of powerful players gives us cause to review the state of the law on abuse of dominance. Specifically, the...

Many of the largest and most successful businesses today rely on providing services at no charge to at least a portion of their users. Consider companies as diverse as Dropbox, Facebook, Google,...

The European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) featured a Focus Panel on ‘Common Ownership: Antitrust Meets Corporate Governance’ at their Annual Members’ Meeting in Berlin, in May 2018. The...

Addressing entrenched inequality is a pressing matter in India. It appears to acquire special urgency every five years, when a general election beckons. If 2013 saw the enactment of a mandatory...

Like many other forms of economic regulation, the regulation of competition takes place, for the most part, at the national level. It’s no great surprise that efforts to develop international law in...

Noncompete agreements, which prevent employees from going to work for competitors or starting competing businesses, have become pretty common: 38 percent of workers have at some point signed a...

The digital economy has boasted of 'unicorns', 'change agents' and 'disruption'. But the difficult question that competition law, and the European Commission, must grapple with is whether the nature...

Following an in-depth investigation formally launched in June 2014, the European Commission has recently concluded that Ireland granted tax benefits of up to €13 billion to Apple in violation of the...

A debate has recently arisen about whether so-called “common ownership” may negatively affect competition. “Common ownership” describes the situation where large institutional shareholders (...