The «Sorrows» of Antitrust Damages

The thesis put forward by Andrea Montanari, in a dense book dedicated to antitrust damage, is that the setting of private enforcement (as sculpted by the European initiative translated into Directive 2014/104/Eu, with its corollary of domestic reception disciplines), as aimed at ensuring the award of adequate compensation to those who have suffered a prejudice as a result of anticompetitive practices through the «responsibility towards whoever of the perpetrators of the offense», has wrecked havoc on civil liability. More in detail, the goal of combining the traditional public control of the ways in which competition is carried out on the market with an alternative pressure tool, represented by the request for damages put forward by those who have suffered some prejudice because of the failures triggered by the unlawful conduct, has been pursued through a series of forcing – without which, incidentally, the claims for compensation would have substantially fallen on deaf ears – of the tort law system, a forcing made even more marked and problematic by the design to simply insert those deviations into the general fabric of the institution. All wrong, all to be redone? In the following pages, the author summarizes the complex of critical arguments that lead him to execrate the most recent developments recorded on the subject; and, from different perspectives, Pardolesi, Osti and Barela endeavor to verify the points of contact (of friction?) between civil law dogmatic, which claims to be endowed with the exclusive, almost shamanic protection of what it usually insulates as the «first right» (intended, therefore, to hegemonizing the other juridical epiphanies) and practical needs of the fight against market manipulations