Study On Private Antitrust Litigation

Antitrust litigation system could date back to Ancient Roman period, whileantitrust litigation system of modern sense originated from the United States.Antitrust litigation means the legal activity, in which the antitrust substantive lawprovisions are realized through lawsuit behaviors. While antitrust law is an importantcomponent of economic law. Therefore, it’s evident that antitrust litigation belongsto economic law litigation, one of the economic law litigation, owning acommonality of economic law litigation. According to the sponsors’ position, theimplementation of the antitrust law is divided into two types, public enforcement andprivate enforcement, referred to the major developed countries’ juridical practice.Public enforcement, which means, relying on the public power, the AdministrativeAuthorities and their staff take actions to the behavior that contains competition, inorder to safeguard the public interests and protect fair competition in the market.While private enforcement, which means, the private subjects (the consumers,operators, competitors) whose own benefits affected by monopolistic behavior, bringa lawsuit to the court directly with private name in order to require the violator tobear the liability for compensation.Some countries’ antitrust law on private litigation has not set up theadministrative predecessor programs, so private subjects who have suffered damagescaused by monopoly violations, could initiate civil proceedings directly; While inother countries’ antitrust law, private subjects could bring a civil proceedings onlyafter the administrative decisions made by the Antitrust Authorities. The former oneis called direct action mode, while the latter one is defined as administrativepreposing action mode. Administrative enforcement procedures are not currently setas demanded requirements of bringing a civil lawsuit, so dispute case caused bymonopolistic behavior has a relatively independent status in our country.Jurisdiction of the court system of antitrust private litigation, mainly consists oflevel jurisdiction, territorial jurisdiction, transfer of jurisdiction and the exclusive jurisdiction. In the current stage of private antitrust litigation, I think concentratedjurisdiction would solve cases of private antitrust litigation faster, moreprofessionally.The plaintiff qualification issue of private antitrust litigation is directly relatedto what subjects have been given the right to sue, which is a prerequisite for victimsto initiate private antitrust litigation. At present, the United States’ multiple plaintiffsqualification standard and Germany’s influence standard are the main standards.Factually, they are the same in essence, including the legitimate interests of theplaintiff has been or is about to get harmed and the damage caused by acts prohibitedin antitrust law.Class action is a litigation system used to solve group disputes in thecontemporary countries. Here comes its significance in the private antitrust litigation:in some cases, there are uncountable victims, while each individual victim’s damageis small and the cost of individual proceedings is too high, meanwhile the winningchance is tiny, which decreases the activity of independent litigation. If we take theform of class action, which could increase the likelihood of plaintiffs’ winning a suit,bring small claim into reality and enhance deterrence to the offender.In the private antitrust litigation, since the difference between plaintiff anddefendant in strength and position, as well as the asymmetric information, the victimis difficult to obtain the proof giving evidence of monopoly violations, which is thekey to decide the results of the suit. To balance this injustice caused by asymmetricinformation, many countries and regions have provided the evidence rules ofantitrust litigation to facilitate the victim to obtain the evidence, to promote thedevelopment of private antitrust litigation. Evidence rules refer mainly to "disclosureof evidence system" and proof allocation and mitigation of plaintiff.Through conclusive analysis, comparative analysis and empirical analysis,combining with the results of the developed countries’ private antitrust litigation, thispaper would give some advice about our country’s private antitrust litigation on theprocedures syntaxes, plaintiff qualification, class action and evidence rules, which isthe purpose of this article.