Csongor István Nagy

• LL.M., Ph.D., S.J.D.
• Professor at University of Szeged

Contrary to the general view, ‘ancillary restrictions’ designate two separate conceptions, which should be treated as separate doctrines. As a ‘delimitation tool’, ancillarity separates ‘naked’ and ‘ancillary’ restrictions based on ‘reasonable necessity’. As an ‘absorption principle’, ancillarity is a rule of thumb that screens out certain lawful a...

Recently, the CJEU handed down an important ruling in Super Bock Bebidas, where it made three contributions to the case-law on vertical agreements and anti-competitive object. First, it revisited the question of vertical concurrence of wills, in particular the notion of tacit agreement. It held that it amounts to tacit acquiescence and, hence, it i...

The application of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights to the Member States has given rise both to a controversial phraseology and a controversial case-law. This paper offers a reconstruction of the constitutional intent and proposes a conceptualization in conformity with the structural function and the constitutional contemplation of the pouvoir...

This paper demonstrates how European institutions bend to the idea of the mono-ethnic and monolingual nation-state. Instead of encouraging the use of minority languages and accepting them as a value, minority languages are treated as a tolerated but voluntarily assumed handicap. This is in stark contrast to the treatment of other types of protected...

The federal market is a cornerstone of every federal polity. It would be difficult to imagine American federalism without the internal free trade constitutionalized by the Dormant Commerce Clause (DCC). This Article provides a criticism of the Supreme Court’s DCC case law and proposes a new approach that takes economic reality into account. The Art...

Idén ünnepeljük hazánk Európai Unióhoz történő csatlakozásának huszadik és a modern magyar versenyjog születésének negyvenedik évfordulóját. E kettős évforduló kiváló apropóval szolgál a számvetésre az EU-s versenyjog magyar versenyjogra gyakorolt hatását illetően. A jelen tanulmány amellett érvel, hogy bár az EU-s versenyjog recepciója alapvetően...

This article offers a reconstruction and assessment of the emerging rebellion of European constitutional courts against the exceptionless supremacy of European Union (EU) law. It presents the ontological theories of supremacy and how the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) overcame the first two major challenges of its history: the existential challe...

In December 2022, the EU introduced a comprehensive regulatory regime for foreign subsidies, which have so far largely remained under the radar of international trade law. The last couple of decades have seen a considerable increase in the economic import of foreign subsidies. Services and investments have grown from marginal importance to a major...

Three decades ago, in Cole v Whitfield, the High Court of Australia opted for a discrimination-based standard with the argument that s 92 of the Australian Constitution targets solely protectionist measures. This article demonstrates, with the use of comparative law analysis, that, in contrast with this teleology, the High Court has built a lacunos...

The book series Legal Studies on Central Europe seeks to publish comparative legal scholarship on a wide variety of topics. The primary goal of the series is to present and address legal issues which arise in connection with the Central European region, taking into account the legal traditions, culture and approach of the countries therein. The ser...

In the last decade, EU competition law reached a major turning point in its history. Anti-competitive object became an elusive and unpredictable rule, which boosts the risk of false positives and has a significant chilling effect. This article analyses this metamorphosis and the social damages it is causing, and proposes an alternative conception....

On October 6, 2020, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) handed down its judgment in Commission v. Hungary . It found that Hungary had violated the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), as well as internal European Union law—specifically the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (EU Charter). The case arose out of Hungary's 2017 am...

The world trade system’s bedrock was laid more than seventy years ago and its architecture and structural principles were shaped by the societal paradigm of western democracies. The last two decades have seen the admission of various government-dominated economies to the WTO. This raised serious paradigmatic challenges. The system tailored to the n...

The paper proposes an alternative (complementary) narrative for minority rights protection, which is based on dissociation and expressive language. Minority rights protection, besides the traditionalist thinking, should endeavour to identify the buzzwords that are familiar to the rule-of-law and human rights discourse of the 21st century. This ques...

The Institute of Economics, CERS launched a new series of publications entitled “Verseny és szabályozás” (Competition and Regulation) in 2007. Twelve annual volumes have been published so far in Hungarian. The current volume is the second one in English, and it contains 10 selected translations from the crop of the last four years. It offers the re...

Trade liberalization has featured international economic relations since the conclusion of the GATT in 1947. The club it established served as a platform for a series of trade rounds, which have been remarkably successful in diminishing tariffs, and became a truly universal system with the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1994 and the ex...

The EU’s limited powers do not enable its institutions to effectively intervene in cases where Member State actions threaten fundamental values. The recent controversies emerging from some Member States’ human rights and rule of law backsliding turned this question to one of the core issues of the European project, calling for effective fundamental...

Anticompetitive object is a key notion of EU competition law and is being remolded. This paper presents the trajectory of this process and its impact and demonstrates how this impaired the consistency and predictability of competition analysis. Section 2 gives a concise presentation of an idealized form of the pre-Allianz concept. Section 3 examine...

In 1969 a small group of US scholars began discussing the possibility of starting a consortium of Western European Studies programmes. Europe was increasingly becoming an object of study and it was felt that greater coordination of the intellectual effort would help avoid duplication and further the acceleration of research. So began the Council fo...

In the last two decades, World Trade Organization law's public interest exceptions (Article XX GATT, Article XIV GATS, Article 2.2 of the TBT Agreement and Article 20 TRIPS) have seen the emergence and evolution of the doctrine of "weighing and balancing." This paper provides a criticism of this doctrine through a comparative ontological analysis a...

Trade liberalization has shaped international economic relations since the conclusion of the GATT 1947. The last few decades have seen a significant shift in the focus of this process: multilateralism seems to have reached its limits, giving way to regionalism, and the focus of trade liberalization has shifted to non-tariff barriers. While these de...

The private enforcement of EU competition law has been in the center of scholarly discourse for almost two decades. Recently, the CJEU, with its ruling adopted in Vantaa v. Skanska and others, opened a new chapter in the history of EU competition law’s private enforcement. The Court held that the conditions of the existence of this right are questi...

Aside from some general legal requirements, EU law contains no “federal” legal framework for Member States’ collective action regimes. Member States have procedural autonomy in the application of EU law, that is, they are free to determine the structure and way of application and enforcement, with the proviso that national law must not discriminate...

Not surprisingly, collective actions’ regulatory contexts in the US and in Europe differ considerably. US law features a large array of legal institutions which catalyze the operation of class actions but are completely missing in Europe (e.g. contingency fees, no or one-way cost-shifting, super-compensatory damages such as punitive and treble dama...

This chapter presents and analyses the objections against class actions and inquires why the appearance and reception of collective actions, especially the notion of “representation without authorization”, have sparked furious opposition in Europe. It addresses and refutes the major arguments and fears against the opt-out system (unconstitutionalit...

It is probably very easy to agree with the tenet that “[r]ights which cannot be enforced in practice are worthless.” Small claims face hurdles that may prevent individual enforcement and lead to sub-optimal litigation. While the practical non-enforceabilty of small value claims is often conceived as a question of effectiveness, it also has serious...

With the emerging wave of new-generation free trade agreements (both bilateral BITs and multilateral IIAs), investment arbitration has become one of the central issues of the contemporary discourse on international economic relations. Critics argue that investment disputes are settled in the frame of intransparent arbitral proceedings devoid of any...

The paper addresses three questions related to the arbitrability of corporate disputes: the rationale behind the concept of arbitrability at large; the law governing the question of arbitrability and the major arbitrability issues of company law disputes. It argues that arbitrability is predominantly not a public policy but a jurisdictional questio...

Populism is telling voters what they want to hear, knowing that it is neither true, nor feasible. Lately, trade and economic integration has seen the spread of untrue and unfeasible tenets, which have proved to be highly popular and have received a warm welcome. Fueled by imperial fantasies and nostalgia for the long-gone era of protectionism, the...

In Achmea, the CJEU pronounced an arbitration clause in an intra-EU BIT non-compliant with EU law because it found that it endangered the stability of the EU’s judicial architecture and encroached on EU courts’ privilege to interpret EU law. While the judgment came as a huge surprise, its repercussions and aftermath are still uncertain. It is uncle...

This chapter examines the transposition of the Antitrust Damages Directive in Hungary. It begins with an overview of the transposition procedure, focusing on the Hungarian private enforcement landscape and the transposition process. In particular, it considers how the provisions implementing the Directive were built into the Hungarian Competition A...

It is out of the question that nowadays the European competence to defend rule of law and human rights against Member States is one of the core issues of the ‘European project’. In the last decade, the EU institutions have made several benevolent, but feeble attempts to enforce rule of law and human rights requirements. Though EU law’s approach, at...

This paper analyzes the compatibility of intra-EU bilateral investment treaties-intra-EU BITs-with EU law. The status and validity of intra-EU BITs gave rise to a heated debate in Europe, which culminated in the CJEU's recent controversial judgment in Achmea. This Article demonstrates that although the CJEU approached intra-EU BITs from the angle o...

International trade has recently seen turbulent times. It has been subject of heated political and social debates and has generated an animated scholarly discourse. It is not an exaggeration to say that international trade is entering into a new age, where tariffs are no longer the major constraints (though they may still be high in certain sectors...

International trade has recently seen turbulent times. It has been subject of heated political and social debates and has generated an animated scholarly discourse. It is not an exaggeration to say that international trade is entering into a new age, where tariffs are no longer the major constraints (though they may still be high in certain sectors...

International trade has recently seen turbulent times. It has been subject of heated political and social debates and has generated an animated scholarly discourse. It is not an exaggeration to say that international trade is entering into a new age, where tariffs are no longer the major constraints (though they may still be high in certain sectors...

International free trade has become one of the central global issues of the 21st century both in terms of fierce political debates and economic significance. While some states seem to resort to protectionism, others see enormous possibilities in trade liberalization. The paper presents, through the triangle of free trade, local values and economic...

The paper addresses three questions related to the arbitrability of corporate disputes: the rationale behind the concept of arbitrability at large; the law governing the question of arbitrability and the major arbitrability issues of company law disputes. It argues that arbitrability is predominantly not a public policy but a jurisdictional questio...

The paper presents, in an analytical manner, Hungary’s legal experiences with international investment arbitration, giving an in-depth overview of the country’s ICSID cases and their background. Investment disputes are notoriously complex and have several political, economic and regulatory aspects. The purpose of the paper is to present the Hungari...

This chapter analyses EU competition law’s grasp of anti-competitive object in the light of the ECJ’s judgments in Allianz and Cartes bancaires and the Commission’s new De Minimis Notice. The chapter takes a comparative perspective, and provides a detailed outlook to this concept’s counter-part in US antitrust law (per se illegality). The chapter e...

This substantial and original book examines how the EU Private International Law (‘PIL’) framework is functioning and considers its impact on the administration of justice in cross-border cases within the EU. It grew out of a major project (ie EUPILLAR: European Union Private International Law: Legal Application in Reality) financially supported by...

This article analyses, through the prism of the Hungarian Supreme Court's recent decision, the treatment of arbitration clauses in standardized consumer contracts under European unfair terms legislation. After examining the focal points of the Unfair Terms Directive and the national models of implementation, Hungarian law and the Hungarian Supreme...

The paper examines, through the prism of the European Commission's Recommendation, the European approach on collective redress. First, it demonstrates that the introduction of collective redress in respect of small claims is necessary and the opt-out scheme is preferable. Second, it refutes the major arguments and fears against the opt-out system....

Cet article examine l’approche européenne sur le recours collectif. Premièrement, il démontre que, concernant les petites créances, l’introduction du recours collectif est nécessaire et le système opt-out est préférable. Deuxièmement, il examine le problème de la «représentation sans procuration » et démontre que ce n’est pas incompatible avec les...