EU considers special competition court for merger cases News
EU considers special competition court for merger cases

[JURIST] A proposal to create a special competition court within the European Union Court of First Instance [official website] has been publicly endorsed by the Court's head justice, who called it the best "if not the only effective way of ensuring speedier and perhaps even better handling of competition cases" at a conference in London. Court President Bo Vesterdorf [official profile] cited the current backlog of cases and the fact that 243 of the 950 pending cases deal with competition issues, such as appeals of European Commission [official website] decisions regarding mergers. In its most extreme example, the Court took 19 months to annul [JURIST report] a joint venture between Sony and Bertelsmann which the Commission had approved; the companies are appealing the ruling [Reuters report] to the European Court of Justice [official website].

Responding to concerns of British industry, a UK House of Lords committee [official website] has taken up the issue of a special European competition court, forming a committee which will begin hearings on November 22 and produce a report by January. Bloomberg has more.

THIS DAY @ LAW

White supremacists overthrow government in Wilmington, North Carolina

A group of white supremacists overthrew the government of Wilmington, North Carolina on November 10, 1898, killing at least dozens of Black people in the process. The city's Republican government resigned after the 500-2,000 strong white mob burned the offices of a Black-owned newspaper and terrorized black neighborhoods. The new state Democratic government passed laws in 1899 disenfranchising Black voters across North Carolina. Learn more about the 1898 Wilmington Coup.

Supreme Court limited free speech in wartime

On November 10, 1919, the US Supreme Court ruled in Abrams v. United States that the federal government could criminalize speech if it was of a type tending to bring about harmful results, in this case, resistance to the United States war effort. In a powerful dissenting opinion, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes countered that even during wartime, free speech could only be curtailed when there was clear and "present danger of immediate evil or an intent to bring it about."

Leonid Brezhnev dies

On November 10, 1982, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev died of a heart attack. He had served as leader of the USSR from October 1964 until his death. Following his death, the Soviet Union cycled through three more leaders during the 1980s until Mikhail Gorbachev allowed the country to dissolve in 1991. Read an obituary of Leonid Brezhnev from the New York Times.