Competition law preliminary rulings: a quantitative and qualitative overview post regulation 1/2003

Article 267 TFEU (ex Art 234 EC) facilitates a dialogue between the national courts and the CJEU (hereinafter referred to as ‘the Court’) in order to allow national courts to seek guidance on the appropriate interpretation of EU law principles in a particular legal dispute, and from an EU perspective this process seek to enhance the uniform and consistent interpretation of EU law throughout the national courts. The importance of the Article 267 preliminary ruling procedure in developing key principles of EU law, has been stressed on numerous occasions, and in a competition law context, it has been noted that “the preliminary reference procedure has had a disproportionately significant impact on the substantive development of EU competition law.” The significance of the preliminary ruling procedure for EU competition law was clearly demonstrated by my earlier work in this area in Article 234 and Competition Law: An Analysis which provided an analysis of all of the competition-law related rulings by the Court of Justice to 1st May 2004 and this was followed by work which gave an overview of preliminary rulings between 1 May 2004 and end November 2011. This article seeks to update this earlier research and in particular ascertain to what extent the competition law preliminary ruling practice has evolved since the introduction of Regulation 1/2003 and the decentralised context generally for the enforcement of EU competition law.