Or Brook

Or Brook is an Associate Professor of Competition Law at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Pembroke College. She is a member of the University’s Centre for Competition Law and Policy.

Her research span EU, UK, and comparative competition law and policy, with a particular interest in empirical legal research. Her scholarship is grounded in the development of large-scale empirical datasets, combining both qualitative and quantitative methods to offer evidence-based legal and policy analysis.

Or’s research focuses on the boundaries of competition law and its interaction with wider public policy objectives (e.g., sustainability, the regulation of digital platforms, financial stability, and labour rights). She also studies the institutional and procedural aspects of enforcement—how competition authorities and regulators prioritise cases, the role and effectiveness of judicial review, and the implications of decentralised enforcement within the EU’s multi-level governance framework.

Her book, ‘Non-Competition Interests in EU Antitrust Law: An Empirical Study of Article 101 TFEU’ (Cambridge University Press, 2022), presents the first comprehensive empirical study of how public policy considerations are incorporated into the enforcement of Article 101 TFEU across the EU. The book evaluates their compatibility with the objectives of EU competition law and proposes detailed policy recommendations. It has been widely reviewed, including in Modern Law Review, Legal Studies, European Law Review, Concurrences, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Kartellrecht, Yearbook of Antitrust and Regulatory Studies, and the Common Market Law Review.

Or leads the ‘Priority Setting Project’ with Dr Katalin Cseres, examining how competition authorities and other regulators set their enforcement priorities. Combining legal, historical, and empirical research, the project has informed policy debates across the EU and beyond. It is supported by the UNCTAD Research Partnership Platform and has led to a major policy report: Priority Setting in EU and National Competition Law Enforcement, as well as high-level engagements with authorities and organisations including the ICN, UNCTAD, and the OECD. The 

Or also leads the ‘Judicial Review of Competition Law Enforcement in the UK and EU Member States’ study, which she designed and supervised in collaboration with Professor Barry Rodger and an advisory board of EU-wide experts. This project, involving 28 national expert teams, offers the first empirical mapping and assessment of judicial review in competition law enforcement across the EU and UK. With over 5,000 judgments coded using a rigorous methodology, it provides a unique open-access database of 32 case-level and 50 jurisdiction-level variables to evaluate the effectiveness of review mechanisms. Findings have been published in an edited volume (Wolters Kluwer, 2024), including Or’s analysis of the UK and comparative insights.

Beyond competition law, Or has a strong interest in empirical legal methodology, particularly systematic content analysis of legal texts. Her methodological work has been published in Politics of European Legal Research and the European Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (EJELS). She was elected President of the European Society for Empirical Legal Studies (ESELS) for the 2026–27 term.

Or serves as Director of the UK branch of the Academic Society for Competition Law (ASCOLA) and is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Competition Law and Economics (Oxford University Press).

She welcomes supervision enquiries from graduate students interested in competition law and empirical legal research.