Market Regulation and Paramount Principles between Theory and Practice

The topic of this paper is a survey of the interplay between market regulation and public-private enforcement, with the particular aim to analyze its regulatory efficiency as a technique for managing social power. The study first reviews the current framework of market regulation, then it analyzes the issue of legal harmonization and the way competition and fairness, public and private enforcement, make up the two sides of the same coin in a European perspective. Specific attention is devoted to identifying a unique fil rouge in the wide and fragmented market law, while looking for its paramount principles. Then, the paper focuses on the «customer protection», questioning the issue of what exactly «market integrity» is. The conclusion of this study is that market regulation, although aimed at preventing market failures, sometimes turns out to be a «regulation failure» due to the fact that procedural law remains paradoxically outside the process of legal harmonization and national jurisdictions lack coordination in the common internal market.