Completed PhD projects
EU Legal Studies has a long tradition of research excellence. It hosted several Ph.D projects that are still authoritative in the field.
Jerome De Cooman (2024) - The AI Act as a regulatory framework for technology: the rationales for regulation at the EU level revisited
In the first part of the thesis, which takes the choice to regulate the market as a starting point, the author reconceptualises or revisits the well-known, often used but less often questions notions of regulation, economic, social, rights-based and risk regulation. He subsequently uses those concepts to lay bare how the EU legislator, in the framework of the internal market and harmonisation based on Article 114 TFEU, oftentimes relies on an implicit combination of regulatory rationales to justify the adoption of a harmonising instrument. Those rationales, the author nevertheless submits, are not always fully coherent with each other and require more explicit attention at the stage of regulatory designs. To arrive at that conclusion, he has revisited in an impressive manner the theoretical literature on regulation and regulatory rationales prior to outlining how those rationales come to play in the internal market. The second part of the thesis goes to the heart of his research question and asks whether, in the framework of technology regulation – applied to the field of AI Regulation – this problem emerges with the same degree of intensity or whether the legislator, given the issues inherently associated with technological uncertainties, has taken a more explicit and coherent approach. After drawing out, in two chapters, the specifics of technology and technology regulation, he subsequently and in a very detailed manner analyses the AI Act and the provisions it contains. That analysis allows him to conclude that the AI Act (based on Article 114 TFEU) suffers from the same defects as previous internal market regulations. As a result, he develops a series of constructive suggestions to make regulatory rationales more implicit and to ensure coherence among them. In that regard, he makes tailored suggestions to make justifications for the AI Act more explicit, but also develops the basics for a framework that could be used to analyse other instruments of EU technology regulation.
- Supervisor: Pieter Van Cleynenbreugel
- Supervisor: Nicolas Petit
- Committee chair: Ljupcho Grozdanovski
- Committee member: Sofia Ranchordas
- Committee member: Bilel Benbouzid
Funding: ARC Project (DIGITALPLATFORMS)
Benjamin Jan (2023) - Artificial intelligence-powered Mutual Recognition in the field of free movement of goods: an inquiry into the legal status of AI-automated and supported decisions within the European Administrative space
More than 40 years after Cassis de Dijon, the mutual recognition in the field of goods is still a failure. The promise of this principle for ensuring both market access and regulatory diversity has not been kept. Therefore, businesses rarely rely on mutual recognition to sell their products in another Member State. Although the principle is anything but new, the EU legislature tried to enhance MR with procedural frameworks to discipline Member States in their unlawful recourses of mutual recognition’s derogations. Despite those attempts, administrative cooperation is permeated by a lack of trust that creates costly non-tariff barriers to trade.
Next to the old yet never solved barriers to effective mutual recognition, the EU stands at the present moment on the brink of the Fourth industrial revolution and should take advantage of it. Instead of focusing on the actual debates about the regulation of AI systems and their risks, a new and pragmatic approach by using AI and machine learning algorithms as tools to enhance the principle of mutual recognition explores the opportunities AI could bring to the governance of the Internal Market.
Supervision: Pieter Van Cleynenbreugel
Funding: ARC Project (DIGITALPLATFORMS)
Dirk Auer (2019) - Innovation Defenses and Competition Laws : The Case for Market Power
The thesis studies the role that innovation occupies – and should occupy– in Antitrust/Competition analysis, and puts forward a coherent framework for the analysis of “innovation defenses” (defined as situations where a restriction of competition is necessary to produce a socially desirable innovation).
As the thesis shows, the power of incentives and the probabilistic nature of innovation have major ramifications as far as antitrust law is concerned. Competition laws strictly regulate the various circumstances under which firms are allowed – or not – to earn profits that significantly depart from the competitive benchmark. At the same time, it is these supracompetitive profits that draw firms to innovate in the first place. Antitrust authorities must thus reach a complex tradeoff between incentives to innovate and competition.
Indeed, as Kenneth Arrow famously argued, innovation involves a significant time consistency problem: “[I]n a free enterprise economy, the profitability of invention requires a nonoptimal allocation of resources.” Ex ante, innovators require some incentive (typically financial) in order to produce innovations. A benevolent social planner would thus want to grant innovators some measure of market power (profits) to reward their contributions to society. However, ex post, once an innovation has been produced, these expected profits are no longer socially optimal. This is because innovations ultimately rest upon information whose marginal cost is close to zero once it has been produced. The socially optimal price is thus also close to zero, which leaves no incentives for further innovation. This puts authorities in a bind.
To make matters worse, it often falls upon innovators to put in place market mechanisms which ensure they earn a return on their innovations, “artificially” limiting competition in the process. These “appropriability mechanisms” (appropriability is the extent to which an innovator captures the social value of its innovation) generally do not sit well with competition authorities, whose mission is, broadly, to prevent firms from increasing their market power through a variety of prohibited practices.
There is thus a constant tension between antitrust enforcement and the promotion of innovation. This task is complicated by the fact that the ex ante / ex post tradeoff is mostly intangible. It will generally be the case that no single innovation can be traced back to antitrust authorities’ restraint, nor can a single antitrust intervention easily be associated with reduced innovation. Just like people trying to respect their new year’s resolutions (lose weight, read more, etc.), no single departure is likely to be of pivotal importance. But a slew of small deviations will add up and may ultimately scupper authorities long term plans to bolster firms’ incentives.
- Director: Nicolas Petit
- Committee chair: Axel Gautier
- Committee member: Paul Belleflamme
- Committee member: Alexandre de Streel
- Committee member: Ekaterina Rousseva
- Committee member: Paul Nihoul
- Committee member: Randal C. Picker
Jorge Marcos Ramos (2018) - Incumbency and First-Mover advantages in EU competition law
This thesis first seeks to expose the positive role (if any) of the origins of dominance in the enforcement of Article 102 TFEU. Second, it explains why dominant firms are neither equal, nor should the effects of their conduct be equally assessed under Article 102 TFEU.
Jonathan Wildemeersch (2018) - The myth of the right to an effective remedy in the judicial review of the European Union
The thesis proposes a two-part examination of the right to an effective remedy in the context of litigation on the legality of EU acts. The first part describes the origins, foundations and content of this right in the EU legal order. Following an examination of the texts (and their evolution) and the case law of the Court of Justice, the author demonstrates that the action for annulment of EU acts, provided for in article 263 TFEU, does not guarantee, in the current state of interpretation of its conditions by the Court of Justice, the right to an effective remedy of the citizen of the Union.
In the second part of the thesis, the author investigates what other elements are necessary to ensure a genuine review of the legality of EU acts in the comprehensive system of remedies and procedures supposedly established by the TFEU. At the end of his analysis of the preliminary reference, the plea of illegality and the action for extra-contractual liability, the author concludes that these procedures do not provide the required jurisdictional protection. On the basis of this observation, he envisages the creation of a preventive declaratory action likely to compensate for the deficiencies of the mechanism of control of the legality of the Union's acts. Based on Article 19 TEU, this action would be integrated into the national remedies.
- Director: Melchior Wathelet
- Director: Hakim Boularbah
- Committee chair: Pieter Van Cleynenbreugel
- Committee member: Koen Lenaerts
- Committee member: Dominique Ritleng
- Committee member: Takis Tridimas
Bernard Vanbrabant (2013) - Intellectual property: legal nature and patrimonial regime
This thesis is a general study of intellectual property from a civil law viewpoint. In a first part, it addresses the legal nature of IP rights and in particular their relations to the traditional concepts of goods, property, ownership and patrimony. What does IP have in common with the property of tangible goods, and what are its specificities? The thesis questions also peculiar legal remedies whose effects are similar to IP rights, namely the so-called "theft" of information in criminal case law and the sanction of imitation under the law of unfair commercial practices ("parasitism" theory). The protection of IP as a fundamental right, under Art. 1 of the First Protocol to the European Convention of Human Rights, is also studied.
In a second part, the thesis questions the possibility to apply, to intellectual property, rules and mechanisms provided for by the Civil Code in relation to tangible goods, namely acquisition through use and rights extinction by non-use (praesciptio), co-ownership and usufruct.
The last, and most substantial, part, concerns the two main contractual arrangements regarding IP, namely its assignment and its licensing. Again, it appears that several provisions of the Civil Code, in particular regarding sale and lease, may be applied to fill in the gap of lex specialis.
- Director: Pascale Lecocq
- Director: Alain Strowel
- Committee chair: Michèle Vanwijck
- Committee member: Andrée Puttemans
- Committee member: Franck Gotzen
- Committee member: André Lucas
Alexandre Defossez (2013) - Social dumping in the EU: Study in the light of primary law and the posting directive
The denunciation of the risk of “social dumping” that the process of European economic integration poses to the social systems of the Member States appears, implicitly, throughout the history of the construction of the internal market. Recent examples of such denunciations have been the subject of strong media coverage, which should not, however, hide the age of the risk thus denounced. Several cases have thus hit the headlines and have prompted citizens and unions to question political leaders, European and national. The purpose of this study arises from this question: the risk of social dumping being a permanent fear within the Union, a fear itself associated with the construction and deepening of the European internal market, what legal mechanisms has the European legislator put in place (or not) in order to counter the effects? The objective of this research is, more specifically, to identify the way in which these recurring debates have led the European legislator to adopt mechanisms to combat social dumping and to assess the effects of the mechanisms thus put in place. It will therefore not be a question of analyzing how the European area is itself integrated into the global economic fabric and can, on this occasion, protect itself against the risk of social competition induced by exchanges with the rest of the world. Intra-European social dumping, and the way in which the European Union seeks (or not) to guard against it, forms the more modest core of this study.
- Director: Patrick Wautelet
- Committee chair: Jean-Michel Servais
- Committee member: Anne-Lise Sibony
- Committee member: Catherine Barnard
- Committee member: Emmanuelle Mazuyer
- Committee member: Marc Rigaux
Nicolas Petit (2007) - Oligopoly, tacit collusion and European Competition Law
The thesis is an in-depth study of the Community control mechanism of tacit collusion in oligopoly. The research had three main objectives: to conduct an audit of the positive law applicable to tacit collusion in oligopoly (1), to evaluate the effectiveness of the instruments for controlling tacit collusion in oligopolies (2), and to formulate proposals for the improvement de lege ferenda of the solutions (normative and jurisprudential) adopted by the competent authorities and jurisdictions (3).
- Director: Olivier Caprasse
- Director: Damien Géradin
- Committee Chair: Melchior Wathelet
- Committee member: Jean-François Bellis
- Committee member: Pierre Larouche
- Committee member: Paul Nihoul
- Committee member: Anne Perot
- Committee member: Denis Waelbroeck
