Publications

► Full Reference : Frison-Roche, M.-A., Droit de la concurrence et droit de la compliance ("Competition Law and Compliance Law), November 2018,  in Revue Concurrences n° 4-2018, Art. n° 88053, pp. 1-4.  -   ► Summary: Compliance Law is a new branch of Law, still under construction. One can have a “narrow definition” of seeing it as the obligation of businesses to show that they are constantly and actively complying with the law. One can have a richer definition, of a substantive nature, defining it as the obligation or the own will of certain companies to achieve “monumental goals” that go beyond economic and financial performance. Competition Law partly integrates its two conceptions of Compliance: Precursor, Competition Law concretizes dynamically the first conception of Compliance Law. It is with more difficulties but also much more future that Competition Law can express in dialectic the second conception of Compliance Law as internationalization of these “monumental goals”, especially in the digital space. -   📝 read the article (in French) - 🚧read the Working Paper on which this Article is based, with footnotes, technical references and hypertext links.     -

This working paper served as a basis for a conference done in French for the Centre de droit comparé (Center for Comparative Law) in Paris on 23 November 2018. Updated, it has served as a basis for an article published in French in a book of the Société de Législation comparé (Society of Comparative Legislation).   -   "The whistleblowers". This is a new expression. Which wins a full success. Barely heard once, we hear it everywhere … A theme not only of academic teaching, but rather a topic of daily conversation. Because it is every day that we speak about it, in terms more or less graceful. For example President Donald Trump on October 1, 2019 told the press he "wants to interrogate" the whistleblower who would have unlawfully denounced him and would not have, according to him, the right to conceal his own identity, evidence in this according Donald Trump of the false character of his assertions against him, while his lawyer indicates on October 6, 2019 that he does not speak on behalf of a single whistleblower thus taken apart but of a plurality people who gave information against the President of the United States. Even the most imaginative scriptwriters would not have written twists as abruptly or so fast. Spectators, we wait for the next episode, secretly hoping for climbs and slashs. Precisely if we go to the cinema, it is still a whistleblower whose dedication and success, or even drama, we are told, for the benefit of the global society, and especially of Democracy, since the secrets are fought for the benefit of the truth. Thus, the movie The Secret Man designates Mark Felt as the first whistleblower. Returning to what is often presented as a more "serious" media, for example in France the radio "France Culture" we can learn the story of a historian who worked as an archivist on events that the political power would have wanted to keep hidden by possibly destroying their traces but that his profession led to preserve¹On the more general fact that cinema is undoubtedly the medium which most seriously restores the state of the Law, c. Frison-Roche, M.-A., Au coeur du Droit, du cinéma et de la famille : la vie, 2016.: here it is expressly presented to the studious listeners as a "whistleblower" … While the same radio is trying to find the one that could be, as in a kind of contest, the "first whistleblowers"²L'histoire du premier lanceur d'alerte, France Culture, septembre 2019. ?. This rewriting of History can be made because finally Voltaire for Calas, or Zola for Dreyfus did they anything else?  It is also a topic of legislative debate since in the United States the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 inserted in the 1934 law that established the Securities & Exchanges Commission (SEC) a complete system for retribution and remuneration of whistleblowers, while after elaborating guidelines about about in 2012³European Commission, Guidelines on Whistleblowing, 6 of December 2012, SEC(2012) 679 final, updated on 23 of April 2018. , the European Commission has published the text on November 20, 2018 in order to give the character a unified European status, in the device gradually developed to protect the one that was presented in 2018 as who  like that : ""The new whistleblowers' protection rules will be a game changer. In the globalised world where the temptation to maximise profit sometimes at the expense of the law is real we need to support people who are ready to take the risk to uncover serious violations of EU law. We owe it to the honest people of Europe.". Step for the Directive of October 7, 2019.  In Europe, the Directive first approved by a Resolution of the European Parliament on 16 April 2019 on protection of persons reporting breaches of Union law and then adopted on 7 October 2019 (Directive 2019/78 (EU) of the European Parliament European Union and the Council of the European Union on the Protection of Persons Reporting Breaches of Union law, will have to be transposed in the next two years to the legal systems of the Member States. is not general, since only "violations of European Union Law" are targeted but the character of the "whistleblower" is more generally referred to: it is "whole"⁴However, precisely the so common use of plurality ("whistleblowers") raises doubts about the uniqueness of the character. On this question, see. all the first part of the developments of this study, which leads to the conclusion rather than beyond the multitude of particular cases, there are rather two kinds of whistleblowers. V. infra I.. In short, the whistleblower is a star ⁵The director of the film La fille de Brest says that she considers the whistleblower at the origin of the case of the Pick as a "movie character".. A kind of historical character, covered with blows and glory, going from Voltaire to Snowden, one as the other being incarnated on the screens⁶Thus, the adventures of Snowden were brought to the screen by Oliver Stone in 2016, Snowden. On the question of knowing whether this film "faithfully reproduces" or not the case, Schetizer, P., Le film Snowden est-il à la hauteur de la réalité?, 2017. This article is favorable to the whistleblower, and to the film which tells us with emotion his case, in particular because (sic), it is easier than to read the Washington Post. …. Recognized by national legislations, which associate to him a legal regime of protection to such a point that, like a tunic of Nessus, it is this legal regime which will define his character and not the opposite. When we read the French law of December 9, 2016 relative à la transparence à la lutte contre la corruption et à la modernisation de la vie économique (on transparency in the fight against corruption and the modernization of economic life), usually known as "Sapin 2 Act", we note that the lawmaker makes much of this character, because he devotes to him the chapter II: "De la protection des⁷Underlined by us. lanceurs d'alerte" ("The protection of⁷Underlined by us. whistle-blowers") and that it is by his very protection that the French Parliament formally opens the door of Law to him and throws it openly. But why a plural? Certainly when we read the recitals of the European Directive of 7 October 2019 on the protection of whistleblowers⁸About this directive, v. the developments infra, this is only an enumeration of all the subjects about which it is a good idea to to protect them, which encourages us to see in this plural only the index of this non-exhaustive list of topics about which it is good that we are alerted, sign of the lack of definition … Reading the French law known as "Sapin 2" makes us less severe but more perplex. Indeed, from this plurality covered by the title of the chapter devoted to Les lanceurs d'alerte ("The whistleblowers"), there is no longer any question in the rest of the law, in the very definition that follows, Article 6 which opens this chapter devoted the "whistleblowers" offering the player immediately a singular since it begins as follows:  "Un⁹Underlined by us. lanceur d'alerte est une personne …" (A! footnote-1684 whistleblower is a person …"). No more mention of diversity. The art of legislative writing would have even required that the qualifying article should not be singular but not yet indefinite.  Thus seem to contradict in this law "Sapin 2" itself the very title which presents the character, in that it uses a definite plural ("the whistleblowers") while the article of definition which presents the topic does it by using the singular indefinite : "a whistleblower….". This is a first reason to move forward only in a very cautious way, in this "step by step" that constitutes a word-by-word reading: a gloss. This method consists in taking literally the expression itself. The second reason for this technical choice is that the gloss is well suited to an introduction of a collective work, allowing more specific developments to take place in other contributions, for example on the techniques, the difficulties and the limits of this protection, or the history of it, or the reasons for the arrival in French law of these American or Brithish whistleblowers and the way they develop, or not, in other legal systems or other countries. I will therefore content myself with taking again literally this already legal expression: The (I) launchers (II) of alert (III). See below developments.  

This working paper serves as the basis for an intervention in the conference held at the Collège de France. Read the presentation of this conference (made in French).   SUMMARY :  For the moment, Compliance can be considered as almost "nothing" because in Europe Compliance is just a "reaction", verty technical, costly and empty against the U.S.(I). And for the moment, we only see one accumulation of mechanical sectorial constraints guided by the concern of efficiency, without associating this to the construction of the Europe .(II) On the contrary, what is before us, the tools and actors being already available : formulating the political goal of the Compliance Law: building Europe, a market where the center is the Person (III.     

► Full Reference: Frison-Roche, M.-A., Competition Law & Compliance Law , Working Paper, October 2018. -   ► this Working Paper has served as basis for an Article published later in French in the Review Concurrences  ; read the presentation in English of this Article.  -   ► Summary and introduction : Compliance Law is a new branch of Law, still under construction. One can have a "narrow definition" of seeing it as the obligation of businesses to show that they are constantly and actively complying with the law. One can have a richer definition, of a substantive nature, defining it as the obligation or the own will of certain companies to achieve "monumental goals" that go beyond economic and financial performance.The Competition Law partly integrates its two conceptions of Compliance: Precursor, the Competition Law concretizes dynamically the first conception of the Compliance Law (I) It is with more difficulties but also much more future that the Competition Law can express in dialectic the second conception of the Compliance Law as internationalization of these "monumental goals", especially in the digital space (II).

Référence générale : Frison-Roche, M.-A., Game of Thrones: a so classical Law. For the moment. Working paper, 2018,  http://mafr.fr/en/article/game-of-thrones-un-droit-si-classique/  This working paper has been written to be the base for an article published in French, "Game of Thrones : un Droit si classique. Pour le moment", for a collective book Game of Thrones et le Droit.    Summary. In this series filled with grandiose surprises, epic characters, reversals, and all the more so as it began to run faster than the book it was born, we would find only what we know already of Law: it would be enough to raise the disguises, as one does in a fable. We then find the classic legal rules (I), the reproduction in decal of the feudal legal organization (II), sometimes contested in the name of exogenous principles (III). But it is remarkable that the series is not over yet. But what will happen does not refer to legal issues that we do not control ourselves? Unknown season in the full sense of the term, frozen legal terrain and uncertain soil of a Law that would take the form of "faceless" and "walking dead"? (IV).

► Complete reference: Frison-Roche, M.-A., Yes to the principle of the will, No to the pure consents, working document for an article written in French Oui au principe de volonté, Non aux consentements purs, to Mélanges dedicated to Pierre Godé, 2018, available at #lien192 en / article / yes-in-principle-of-the-desire-not in the consent /   ► Summary: Pierre Godé devoted his thesis to defend the freedom of the human being, freedom that the person exercises by showing his will. This will manifests itself, even tacitly, by this trace of "consent". In a liberal society, politically and economically, that is to say a society based on the principle of the will of the person, consent must always be defined as the manifestation of the will, this link between consent and will being indivisible ( I). But by a perversion of liberalism, "consent" has become an autonomous object of the freedom of the person, mechanical consent that has made it possible to transform human beings into machines, machines to desire  and machines to be desired, in a world of " pure consents","where we keep clicking, consenting to all without ever wanting. This consent, which has been split from the free will of the person, is the basis of the markets of the Human and the illiberal democracies, threats against human beings (II). The future of Law, in which Pierre Godé believed, is to continue to aspire to protect the human being and, without countering the free will of the human being as the movement of the law of the consumption had been tempted to, to renew with a liberal movement of Law and to fight against these systems of pure consents (III).   🔻read the article below (in French).

Full reference : Frison-Roche, M.-A., Le Droit de la Compliance au-delà du Droit de la Régulation, Recueil Dalloz, 2018, chronique, pp. 1561-1563.   Summary : A movement started from precise legal requirements linked to identified actors, as the financial or banking sector, to transform itself in legal norms of Compliance. Compliance Law is thus the extension of Regulation Law. But Compliance Law is taking its full autonomy with regards with Regulation Law, while retaining its violence, its radicalisé, and even its archaism, even though it concerns companies which do not act on regulated sectors, putting down, for instance, notions linked to territoriality (I). How companies should react face to this unequaled news (II)?  Read the article (in French) Read the table of contents of the Review (in French). This document is based on a working paper with footnotes, technical references and hypertext links.