The European Standardisation System at a Crossroads

Dr. Justus Baron is a Research Director at Northwestern University, Center on Law, Business, and Economics. Justus holds a PhD in Economics from Mines ParisTech. His area of expertise is the economic analysis of technological innovation, standardisation, and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR).

Justus’ academic research has been published in leading scholarly outlets, such as Research Policy, International Journal of Industrial Organization, Antitrust Law Journal, and Journal of Economics and Management Strategy. Justus has created the Searle Center Database, which offers comprehensive data on standards and standardisation processes to academic researchers.

Justus regularly contributes to European policy debates on topics related to standardisation. He has authored several comprehensive studies for the Joint Research Center of the European Commission on the governance of standards organisations and the licensing of Standard-Essential Patents (SEP). He was also a member of the European Commission’s Expert Group on SEPs, and has produced empirical studies to support the European Commission with an impact assessment on SEPs.

Prof. Pierre Larouche holds the chair of Law and Innovation at Université de Montréal, where he also directs the PhD programme on Innovation, Science, Technology and Law.

A graduate of McGill University, Bonn University and Maastricht University and a law clerk at the Supreme Court of Canada, Pierre Larouche was Professor of Competition Law at Tilburg University (Netherlands) from 2002 to 2017. There he founded and directed the Tilburg Law and Economics Center (TILEC), one of the largest research centres on economic governance. He also conceived and launched the Bachelor Global Law, an innovative law degree inspired by his meta-comparative and inter-disciplinary method. In his capacity as Associate Dean, he led the LL.B. reform at Université de Montréal. Pierre Larouche also taught at the College of Europe (Bruges) (2004-2016), and he has been a guest professor or scholar at McGill University (2002), National University of Singapore (2004, 2006, 2008, 2011, 2013), Northwestern University (2009-2010, 2016-2017), Sciences Po (2012), the University of Pennsylvania (2015) and the Inter-Disciplinary Center (IDC, 2016).

Pierre Larouche’s research centers around economic governance, and in particular how law and regulation struggle to deal with complex phenomena such as innovation. An expert in competition law and civil liability, his works have been cited by the European Court of Justice and the UK Supreme Court, and they have influenced EU policy on electronic communications, competition and standardisation.