Are External Values to Competition Law Taken into Consideration by Judges in Recent Competition-Related Case Law of the Court of Justice of the European Union?
Copyright (c) 2025 Kecsmár Krisztián
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Abstract
The borrowing of concepts from other areas of law to interpret the rules of the area of law that the person is entitled to enforce is a relatively new phenomenon in EU competition law judgements of the CJEU. The digitalisation aspect characterised by fast and constant technical developments indisputably provided an occasion for EU judges to turn to external values in their judgements related to competition law. This aimed to cope with new challenges necessitating the incorporation of exogenous values by EU judges in the field of competition law. A spectacular illustration of such trend is the Meta Platforms Case in which the CJEU judgement came out in July 2023. Other novelties can, however, also appear even in the absence of rapid technical evolution necessitating the same recourse to external values, such as in relation to sport-related cases of Superleague, ISU and Royal Antwerp. The present paper aims to find the answer to what extent external values can be borrowed from other areas of law, by illustrating the cases mentioned above, which are limited to this aspect only, in order to allow EU judges to incorporate them into their competition law analysis.
Keywords:
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