Profile

Pinar Akman

Prof. Dr.

Bio

Pinar Akman’s (LLB, LLM, PhD) main areas of expertise and interest are EU, UK and global competition law and policy (antitrust), law and technology, contract law, consumer law, and, law and economics including behavioural economics. Her research is interdisciplinary and she has widely published in leading law, as well as economics, law and economics, law and technology, and political science journals. Most of her research to date has focused on EU competition law and its application. Her teaching activities also include courses on EU and global competition law and policy, as well as contract and consumer law, which also focus on EU aspects and their relation with UK law. At the University of East Anglia, she was one of the investigators who secured over £4 million in funding from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council for the Centre for Competition Policy. At Leeds, she was the Director of the Centre for Business Law and Practice, one of the largest commercial law research centres in the UK with over 30 members of full-time faculty. In 2017, she was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Law (Leverhulme Trust) which recognizes "the achievement of outstanding researchers whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising”. She has used the Prize funds (£100,000) to research the optimal application of competition law in online technology markets, a highly topical subject in the EU, not least due to the active enforcement activity of the European Commission in this space. She is the author of The Concept of Abuse in EU Competition Law: Law and Economics Approaches (Hart Publishing, Oxford, 2012; reprinted, 2015). She is a Non-Governmental Advisor to the UK and to Turkey for the International Competition Network, the network of over 130 competition authorities from around the world. She actively contributes to global policy-making in the area of competition and technology, and has appeared as a witness at the US Federal Trade Commission’s hearings on competition and consumer protection in the 21st century, focusing on the challenges of digitalisation, as well as a witness in front of the UK House of Lords on topics of internet regulation, competition, and competition policy after Brexit. She is a regular speaker at international fora and in 2018, she took part in a live Intelligence Squared debate on “Break up the Tech Giants”, which was broadcast by BBC World News to a global audience of 70 million viewers.

Courses - English