Current Visitors

Professor Thomas Ackermann (LMU Munich)

Visit dates: 01 October - 20 December 2024

https://www.jura.lmu.de/en/faculty/directory-of-persons/contact-page/thomas-ackermann-6fb6039e.html

Research areas: 
Private Law, EU Law and International Commercial Law

Research objectives: 
During his stay in Cambridge Professor Ackermann will be conducting research on 'Digital Markets and Democracy - A Perspective from EU Law'. He will explore the respective roles of the EU and its Member States in protecting and regulating competition with instruments of competition law, regulatory law, and intellectual property law, in particular with a view to digital markets. This project forms a part of his overarching research topic “Markets and Democracy”. The power of digital “gatekeepers”, namely Apple, Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook) and Amazon, is widely regarded as a threat to markets and also to the functioning of democracies and has prompted legislators around the world to take measures intended to reign in digital market power while at the same time preserving the innovation potential and consumer benefits of digital markets. While a lot of (legal and economic) scholarship is focused on substantive aspects of these rules, the institutional side of this development is under-explored. Considering that digital market power is a global phenomenon, but democratic decision-making is still largely confined to national borders, the question of how regulatory measures in this field can be both effective and democratically legitimate, is difficult to answer. From this perspective, the EU can be seen as an attempt to overcome this problem within the framework of a transnational democracy. However, this leads to tensions and frictions in the relationship between the EU and its Member States, and between different areas of the law (competition law, regulatory law, intellectual property) that will be further explored.

Professor Kelvin Kwok (University of Hong Kong)

Visit dates: 01 February - 14 March 2025

https://www.law.hku.hk/academic_staff/kelvin-kwok/

Research areas: 
Competition Law, Consumer Law, Private Law, Law and Technology, Law and Economics and Legal Theory/Jurisprudence

Research objectives: 
During his stay in Cambridge, Professor Kwok's research will evaluate the extent to which contract law may serve as a useful antitrust benchmark for buyer exploitative abuses, such as the exploitative conduct of supermarket chains, department stores, and other ‘gatekeeping’ retailers. A contract-based benchmark may help achieve procedural fairness by ensuring that expectations and standards of fair dealing are properly respected by commercial buyers in a dominant position. If the buyer is minded to vary the contractual bargain by demanding more from the supplier (in terms of payment or risk bearing), proper contractual procedures should be followed: the buyer should not threaten contractual breach to achieve its goal. The project will not only focus on the utility of contract law from an antitrust perspective, but will also explore the limitations of contract law in this respect. In particular, although contract law may provide relevant benchmarks for assessing the procedural fairness of supply transactions, it is unlikely to be useful in safeguarding the substantive fairness of such transactions.