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From the Editor

Oxford University Press contacted me in 2008 to market test the concept of online Oxford Competition Law. I was impressed with its foundation: the digitisation of OUP’s first-rate suite of competition law commentaries. These textbooks are already on the desks of every competition lawyer in the EU, or they should be. Now they would be available online. Fabulous. But the concept also included something truly new, which was a thoughtful national case reporter series. This was something OUP wanted me to be involved in, and if it was to succeed, I knew it would need three things:

  • a first-rate editorial team, to ensure that we emphasised only cases with ramifications for the interpretation of European competition law
  • a great network of thoughtful rapporteurs and reviewers, who could advise and report on the leading cases in their particular jurisdiction; and
  • reliable technology, particularly including search fields and key words.

Francesca Halstead, Peter Whelan and I came together as the editorial team; we built a network of rapporteurs and reviewers and began the hard work of getting stuck into the cases; and OUP began designing and beta testing versions of the service, often with our reviewers.

I knew that this was an incredible opportunity to link together leading commentaries with the most important cases – and provide one ideally seamless location for finding out the latest developments. A lot of the leading judicial thinking on European competition law matters comes from the national courts, and it would of true value if practitioners, academics and judges could access this easily, along with thoughtful reflections on the cases’ ramifications for the body of law as a whole. As such, the online case law service has already been feeding future editions of the larger textbook commentaries as well.

This is an innovation we hope you will find to be useful, and we welcome all feedback as we continue to improve the service over the coming months and years.

Dr Philip Marsden
Professor of Law and Economics, College of Europe, Bruges
Senior Research Fellow, British Institute of International and Comparative Law