United Nations Conference on Trade and Development acknowledges work of five former LL.M. students

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) recently recognized the work of five former LL.M. students for work they did in connection with a seminar on International Competition and Developing Countries taught by Eleanor Fox, Walter J. Derenberg Professor of Trade Regulation. Last year Hassan Qaqaya, head of UNCTAD’s Competition and Consumer Policies Branch, asked Fox for assistance on revisions to commentaries to UNCTAD’s Model Law on Competition, which suggests good principles and alternative approaches for developing countries’ competition law. Fox took the assignment into her seminar last spring, and the five students volunteered to center their semester’s work on the project, making it a focus of their research papers. They also worked as a team to draft commentaries on sections of the model law ranging from abuse of dominance to mergers to system design. Fox notes that they demonstrated their dedication to the task by working with the secretariat of UNCTAD’s competition branch even after classes ended.

The five students, who earned their LL.M. degrees in the spring, were a kind of mini United Nations themselves, each hailing from a different country: Simon Peart (New Zealand), Felipe Serrano Pinilla (Colombia), Denise Junqueira (Brazil), Tone Oeyen (Belgium), and Apostolos Giannakoulias (Greece). They are thanked in the official UNCTAD document that incorporates their work. All were also invited to attend the 6th Review Conference of the UNCTAD competition principles, which was held in Geneva in November, where competition law officials from around the world assembled and where the document including their work was adopted. Peart and Serrano attended and participated.

Published February 11, 2011