page_title: English tort law
section_title: Economic torts and competition
hierarchical_section_title: English tort law / Strict and specific torts / Economic torts and competition
context_page_description: English tort law concerns the compensation for harm to people's rights to health and safety, a clean environment, property, their economic interests, or their reputations. A "tort" is a wrong in civil, rather than criminal law, that usually requires a payment of money to make up for damage that is caused. Alongside contracts and unjust enrichment, tort law is usually seen as forming one of the three main pillars of the law of obligations.
  In English law, torts like other civil cases are generally tried in front a judge without a jury.
context_section_description: Economic torts protect people from interference with their trade or business. The area includes the doctrine of restraint of trade and has largely been submerged in the twentieth century by statutory interventions on collective labour law and modern antitrust or competition law. The "absence of any unifying principle drawing together the different heads of economic tort liability has often been remarked upon."
  Two cases demonstrated economic tort's affinity to competition and labour law. In Mogul Steamship Co. Ltd. the plaintiff argued he had been driven from the Chinese tea market by competitors at a 'shipping conference' that had acted together to underprice his company. But this cartel was ruled lawful and "nothing more [than] a war of competition waged in the interest of their own trade." Nowadays, this would be considered a criminal cartel. In labour law the most notable case is Taff Vale Railway Co v Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants. The House of Lords thought that unions should be liable in tort for helping workers to go on strike for better pay and conditions, but it riled workers so much that it led to the creation of the British Labour Party and the Trade Disputes Act 1906. Further torts used against unions include conspiracy, interference with a commercial contract or intimidation.
  Through a recent development in common law, beginning with Hedley Byrne v Heller in 1964, and further through the Misrepresentations Act 1967, a victim of the tort of misrepresentation will be compensated for purely economic loss due to the misconception of the terms of the contract.
  The English doctrine of restraint of trade was the catalyst for much of what is now called "competition laws" (or sometimes "antitrust"). These laws are a way of restraining those who would restrain "free competition" in the market economy, through monopolising production, setting up cartels, imposing unfair trading conditions, prices and so on. The English approach has traditionally been very flexible and liberal in its scope, but draconian when it did deem certain behaviour to be in restraint of trade. Many of these laws around the end of the nineteenth century were focused on the emasculation of trade unionism, until the reforming government of 1906 and the Trade Disputes Act 1906. Aside from the common law, legislation was introduced shortly after the second world war to foot policy on a statutory basis, the Monopolies and Restrictive Practices Act 1948, followed later by the Restrictive Trade Practices Act 1956 and the Monopolies and Mergers Act 1965.
  Since 1972, however, the U.K. has fallen under the cross-border-competition law regime of the European Community, which is found primarily in Articles 81 and 82 of the Treaty of the European Community. Companies that form a cartel or collude to disrupt competition (Article 81) or to abuse a dominant position in the market – for instance through a monopoly (Article 82) – face fines from the public-enforcement authorities, and in some cases they also face a cause of action in tort. A huge issue in the E.U. is whether to follow the U.S. approach of private damages actions to prevent anti-competitive conduct. In other words, the question is what should be seen as a private wrong (as was held in the vertical restraints case of Courage Ltd v Crehan) and what should be seen as a public wrong where only public enforcers are competent to impose penalties. In 1998 the United Kingdom brought its legislation up to date, with the Competition Act 1998, followed by the Enterprise Act 2002, a regime mirroring that of the European Union. The domestic enforcers are the Office of Fair Trading and the Competition Commission.
caption: Strikers gathering in Tyldesley in the 1926 General Strike in the U.K.
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