Abstract

The EU and US legal orders rely on presumptions and other rules of evidence permitting to establish, to the requisite legal standard, the presence of anticompetitive abusive behaviour. This chapter seeks to highlight how and when both legal orders rely on such presumptions and other rules of evidence and what impact such differentiated reliance has on the potential for both legal orders to converge on substantive abuse regulation questions. To that extent, it distinguishes and analyses two different categories of rules of evidence (short-cut rules and evidentiary presumptions) present in both legal orders. General policy and case law evolutions allow to infer that both legal systems seemingly attest to a move away from short-cut rules in favour of evidentiary presumptions. In the US, the latter kind of presumptions are also even more limited in scope and scale. Building on that analysis, the chapter subsequently questions to what extent short-cut rules and evidentiary presumptions serve as analytical benchmarks in the quest for a more globally streamlined abuse regulation framework.