Claudio Lombardi joins the Institute for European Integration as a Visiting Research Fellow at and will stay through December 2016. His research is financed by a grant of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Furthermore he is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg.
Claudio Lombardi is also a visiting lecturer at the International University College of Turin (IUC). Before joining the Europa-Kolleg, Claudio was a research fellow at the Higher School of Economics and Skolkovo Institute for Law and Development, Moscow, where he worked with Prof. Ioannis Lianos (UCL) on a project on competition law and policy in the global food value chain, involving the cooperation of numerous national and international institutions. Prior to joining the Institute, he was a PhD student and tutor at the University of Trento and a Max-Planck Institute guest researcher (MPRIV – Hamburg). Claudio was also awarded a DAAD Grant of the Europa-Kolleg Institute of Hamburg in 2013 and an Erasmus Mundus Scholarship for doctoral researchers in 2012. He is chief editor and coordinator of the English team of the Antitrust Observatory.
His current research project discusses the existence of a duty to share facilities or information in digital markets, and further examines the limits of this duty in the light of the public/private interest divide in (or for) competition law enforcement. Although it is generally taught that competition enforcers should focus exclusively on competition law arguments and objectives in their decisions, it is often forgotten that competition law itself functions as a public interest policy tool in situations where the private interest would normally prevail. Competition law, for instance, may restrict the freedom of parties to contract or the intellectual property rights of a patent holder, on the basis of the fact that it pursues the public interest of the creation and maintenance of a competitive market to the ultimate benefit of consumers. On the other hand, a duty to deal may be opposed on the basis of other objective reasons, which may equally hinge on public interest concerns.
