Competition Law and Innovation – (LL.M.)

The rules on competition and on the control of mergers and acquisitions of businesses have become increasingly important in today’s economic world. Over the past few years the EU Commission and a number of domestic authorities in Europe and the US have had to deal, sometimes in parallel, with several high profile cases involving companies that are “house names” for businesses and consumers, such as Microsoft, Intel and Carlsberg; others are still in the pipeline, including the controversial NewsCorp/BSkyB merger in the United Kingdom. However, these cases have not always lead to consistent decisions, thus raising important issues as to whether, in this globalised world, where encouraging investments and innovation constitutes a key goal, the “right balance” has been struck between upholding genuine rivalry and creating incentives to technical development.

This LLM programme aims to provide students with cutting edge knowledge of the rules on competition and on the control of mergers and especially to enable them to appreciate their complex interaction with other, equally relevant, rules governing the protection of intellectual property and, in appropriate cases, of public interests such as the plurality of the media and the circulation of information. At the end of their course of study, students will be able to critically analyse the relevant legal rules and to apply them to complex questions as well as to compare and contrast them with the principles applicable in other jurisdiction to like scenarios. The LLM programme will therefore enable them to engage with the current debate concerning these and other issues and to participate to it by way of relatively original contributions, grounded in solid legal principle as well as in the understanding of basic economic concepts and of current doctrinal trends.

Programme Objectives

The LLM in Competition Law and Innovation seeks to achieve the following goals:

• Impart in-depth, cutting edge knowledge of the laws governing competition in the EU and UK, with appropriate comparative references to other jurisdictions, and of the laws protecting and encouraging investment and innovation (e.g. Intellectual Property law)
• Focus especially on competition law, as a means to ensuring rivalry on the merits and on the interaction existing between the rules on competition and those legal rules designed to protect, regulate and encourage further innovation, by creating an economic incentive to invest and develop new technologies
• Examine the reciprocal interaction of competition law and intellectual property laws and their joint impact on the development of knowledge and technical development, especially in innovation-led and research- and investment-intensive industries