Ethics

► 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).

►   This working document was intended to serve as a support for a conference pronounced in French in the conference Droit et Ethique ( Law & Ethics) of May 31, 2018 in a symposium organized by the Court of Cassation and the Association Française de Philosophie du Droit.  French Association of Philosophy of Law on the general theme Law & Ethics. See a general presentation of this conference.  Rather, it has served as a support for the article to be published in the Archives de Philosophie du Droit (APD). This article is written in French.    ►   Summary: It is through the Law that the human being has acquired a unity in the West (I). What religion could have done, the Law also did by posing on each human being the indetachable notion of him of "person" (I.A). But this is what is challenged today, not the personality and the power that the human being has to express his freedom but the unity that implies in the disposition that we have of ourselves in repelling the desire that others have always had to dispose of us. Current law tends to "pulverize" human beings into data and transform into neutral legal services what was considered before as the devouring of others. The legal concept of "consent", ceasing to be proof of a free will but becoming an autonomous concept, would suffice (I.B.). To prevent the reigning of the "law of desires", which merely reflects the adjustment of forces, we must demand here and now the ethical sovereignty of Law, because Law can not be just just be just the interests adjustment (II). We can form this request if we do not want to live in an a-moral universe (II.A), if we see that the unity of the person is the legal invention that protects the weak human being (II.B.). If we admit this imperative, then we must finally ask who in the legal system will express and impose it, especially the legislator or the judge, because we seem to have lost the ability to recall this principle of the Person on which the West was so centered. But the principles that are no longer said disappear. There would then remain only the case-by-case adjustment of interests between human beings in the world field of particular forces. At this yardstick, Law would be more than a technique of securisation of particular adjustments. Law would be reduced at that and would have lost its link with Ethics. (II.C). .   

Full reference : Augagneur, L.-M., La compliance a-t-elle une valeur ?, JCP E, n° 40, 5 octobre 2017, p. 1522. Sciences Po students can read the article via the drive, folder "MAFR-Régulation & Compliance".

This article provides a basis for an article published  in the Recueil Dalloz  in French : "Le droit de la compliance". ‘Compliance’ issues have been increasingly discussed in recent years. Articles, handbooks, soft law, decisions or definition have been written. But nothing really converges. The term ‘conformity’ [conformité in French] is used in parallel, or even instead of the usual concept of compliance. There are as many definitions of what compliance is as there are authors writing on the matter. And yet it is used in manifold ways, from Competition law to International Finance law, from the hardest law (enforced with the help of the most stringent sanctions) to business ethics, according to which behaving should be enough to be compliant. At a time when compliance invades law, it should be first noted that we are too shortsighted to grasp the mechanism (I), whereas it is necessary to build a comprehensive Compliance law (II). Read developments below.