Liberal theory and practice of competition law

Liberal theory and practice of competition law Abstract The presented thesis focuses on the matter of competition law from the point of view of selected schools of economic thought. The goal of the thesis is to provide a comprehensive insight into the content and nature of legal norms in the field of competition law and offer a comparison of views of specific traditions of economic theory on the selected bodies of legislation in force. The wider objective of the thesis is to explore the application possibilities of the findings of various economic theories to legal phenomena, with the thesis exploring both the anglo-american branch of economic analysis of law and heterodox approaches, that originate from the continental economic theory and jurisprudence. To this end, the thesis picks three distinct schools of economic thought, that are commonly labeled as liberal, these being the Austrian, Chicago and Freiburg school of economics, each having different methodology, theoretical and analytical conclusions and prescriptive suggestions. Bodies of legislation in force selected for the purposes of this thesis are competition law statutes of the Czech Republic, the Federal Republic of Germany and the EU. The Structure of the thesis applies the "from general to specific" method of explanation, i.e. introductory..