Centre for Business Law and Practice: The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World

Professor Anu Bradford (Columbia University) will continue the Leeds/Mannheim Seminar Series on Business Law with a presentation on her recent book The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World.

Register here.

Abstract

For many observers, the European Union is mired in a deep crisis. Between sluggish growth; political turmoil following a decade of austerity politics; Brexit; and the rise of Asian influence, the EU is seen as a declining power on the world stage. Columbia Law professor Anu Bradford argues the opposite in her important new book The Brussels Effect: the EU remains an influential superpower that shapes the world in its image. By promulgating regulations that shape the international business environment, elevating standards worldwide, and leading to a notable Europeanisation of many important aspects of global commerce, the EU has managed to shape policy in areas such as data privacy, consumer health and safety, environmental protection, antitrust, and online hate speech. And in contrast to how superpowers wield their global influence, the Brussels Effect – a phrase first coined by Bradford in 2012- absolves the EU from playing a direct role in imposing standards, as market forces alone are often sufficient as multinational companies voluntarily extend the EU rule to govern their global operations. The Brussels Effect shows how the EU has acquired such power, why multinational companies use EU standards as global standards, and why the EU’s role as the world’s regulator is likely to outlive its gradual economic decline, extending the EU’s influence long into the future.

Biography

A leading scholar on the EU’s regulatory power and a sought-after commentator on the European Union and Brexit, Anu Bradford coined the term the Brussels Effect to describe the European Union’s outsize influence on global markets. Most recently, she is the author of The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World (2020), named one of the best books of 2020 by the Foreign Affairs. Professor Bradford is also an expert in international trade law and antitrust law. She spearheads the Comparative Competition Law Project, which has built a comprehensive global data set of antitrust laws and enforcement across time and jurisdictions. The project, a joint effort between Columbia Law School and the University of Chicago Law School, covers more than a century of regulation in over 100 countries and has been the basis for Bradford’s recent empirical research on the antitrust regimes used to regulate markets. Before joining the Columbia Law School faculty in 2012, Bradford was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Law School. She also practiced EU and antitrust law in Brussels and has served as an adviser on economic policy in the Parliament of Finland and as an expert assistant at the European Parliament. The World Economic Forum named her Young Global Leader ’10. At the Columbia Law School, Professor Bradford is the director of the European Legal Studies Center, which trains students for leadership roles in European law, public affairs, and the global economy. She is also a Senior Scholar at Columbia Business School’s Jerome A. Chazen Institute for Global Business and a nonresident scholar at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The one-hour seminar will be moderated by Professor Friedemann Kainer, University of Mannheim.

The event will take place via Zoom and will be recorded. Registration for this event will be understood as indicating consent to the talk being recorded.

Joining instructions will be sent 24 hours before the event via email once you have registered.

All welcome. This is a free event, though registration is required via Eventbrite.

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