This chapter traces how the concern about negative economic liberty encoded in the consumer welfare standard and the laissez-faire antitrust approach coined by the Chicago School have transformed competition law on both sides of the Atlantic. It shows how this shift from republican to negative liberty as normative bedrock of competition law led to a recalibration of the role of legal presumptions, the standard of harm and the error–cost framework. It thus identifies the main parameters that drove the transformation of US and EU competition law from a republican antirust to a laissez-faire antitrust approach. This transfiguration displaced republican liberty as non-domination by a thinned-out understanding of negative liberty as non-interference as the ultimate goal of modern competition law and led to the disappearance of the idea of a competition–democracy nexus.

People are often reluctant to make decisions by calculating the costs and benefits of alternative courses of action in particular cases. Knowing, in addition, that they may err, people and institutions often resort to second order strategies for reducing the burdens of, and risk of error in, first-order decisions. They make a second-order decision when they choose one from among such possible strategies. They adopt rules or presumptions; they create standards; they delegate authority to others; they take small steps; they pick rather than choose. Some of these strategies impose high costs before decision but low costs at the time of ultimate decision; others impose low costs both before and at the time of ultimate decision; still others impose low costs before decision while exporting to others the high costs at the time of decision. Political, legal, and ethical issues are also raised by second-order decisions.

[14.1] Sources of doubt are socio-legal phenomena that are the root causes of interpretative doubt.

The previous chapter has presented the general proof rules of causation in competition damages actions. These standard rules burden the claimant with the proof of the essential elements of a tort, including causation. However, the claimant may find it very difficult if not impossible to prove causation, especially when information is limited or is not accessible. As observed in Chapter 5, the standard proof rules place the risk for the proof of the claim and the risk of error due to evidential uncertainty on the claimant. The rules allocating this risk are mainly the result of policy-based decisions aiming at distributing the risk fairly between the parties based on a moral statement. However, on the basis of equally justifiable policy and moral choices, it is possible to create exceptions to this rule in two cases: (1) when the information is readily available to the other party and (2) when it is fair, according to the type of responsibility, to allocate the risk differently.