The Rapidly Changing Landscape Of Private Global Antitrust Litigation: Increasingly Serious Implications For U.S. Practitioners

I. INTRODUCTION

The center of gravity when it comes to private litigation of international antitrust disputes is still in the United States, but two trends affecting the legal landscape in the U.S., U.K., and EU are shifting it across the Atlantic. In this article, we address these trends and further discuss their implications for lawyers handling major antitrust disputes that have global footprints. Much of the discussion will focus on cartel litigation because those cases often involve global issues and present the most obvious examples for our discussion.

The first trend is the evolving jurisprudence of the Foreign Trade Antitrust Improvements Act ("FTAIA"). The FTAIA governs the scope of U.S. antitrust law over sales that implicate foreign comity concerns. While the FTAIA remains among the more baffling statutes to apply, circuit court decisions are multiplying and foreign jurisdictions are adding their own views in support of their own remedies. Complete