This kind of an attitude was nonetheless addressed mainly to public companies, while regarding private ones a general freedom was left to national lawmakers. As a consequence, this choice caused a situation that has been said of regulatory competition between EU member States’ national rules about close companies. This phenomenon was enhanced by EU Treaty’s reassertion of the Freedom of establishment’s principle and gained an even more momentous importance with the interpretation of such a principle also recently provided by EU Court of Justice with a series of well known decisions.
This is the framework commonly said to be currently in act in the EU Company Law. But is it true that harmonization somehow kills regulatory competition, and that regulatory competition is actually not compatible to a general standardization of legal rules throughout the EU?
In the proposed paper I will take into consideration:
- Some empirical evidences of the not correctness of the equation harmonization ≠ regulatory competition;
- The trend of EU institutions regarding Company Law from Directives system, to Regulations, and again apparently towards Directives;
- Some reflections which go beyond the traditional competition concepts of “race to the top” and “to the bottom”, questioning whether actually a “race” can exist, in the EU legal market, between national legal systems, at least based on Company Law.
