Full Name
Despoina Mantzari
Job Title
Associate Professor in Competition Law and Policy
Company
University College London
Speaker Bio
Dr Despoina (Deni) Mantzari is an Associate Professor in Competition Law and Policy, in the Faculty of Laws, UCL where she also serves as co-Director of the Centre for Law, Economics and Society. Her research lies at the intersection of competition law, sector-specific regulation, and public law, and is marked by a distinctive comparative approach spanning the EU, UK, and US, as well as an interdisciplinary methodology drawing on political science and economics. Her scholarship combines doctrinal analysis with qualitative empirical methods and has been supported by the AHRC, ESRC, and the BA/Leverhulme Trust. She has published widely in leading journals such as the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, the Modern Law Review, the Journal of Competition Law and Economics, and the Journal of Antitrust Enforcement. Her monograph, Courts, Regulators and the Scrutiny of Economic Evidence – Comparative Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2022), offers an in-depth examination of how courts and regulators assess complex economic evidence across jurisdictions. Deni joined UCL in 2019. Previously, she was a Lecturer at the University of Reading School of Law and Programme Director of the LLM in International Commercial Law (2014-2018). Deni holds a PhD from UCL (AHRC doctoral scholarship), an LL.M in European Union Law (distinction) from UCL and a law degree from the National University of Athens, Greece. In 2013-2014, Deni was a postdoctoral research fellow at the ESRC Centre for Competition Policy at the University of East Anglia, where she undertook research on behavioural economics and comparative (EU, US) antitrust law. In 2010-2011, she was a visiting researcher at the UC Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law in the USA and in 2016-2017 she was a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in London where she undertook research on the influence of economic evidence on the discretionary assessments of the UK utility regulators as part of her BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant. Deni is co-Director of the Centre for Law, Economics and Society at UCL, an associate fellow of the Centre of Competition Policy at the University of East Anglia and a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. Deni is book review editor for the journal World Competition - Law and Economics Review (Kluwer Law), an associate editor for the Journal of Competition Law and Economics (OUP) and sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Antitrust Enforcement (OUP). She is also joint-Editor of Current Legal Problems. Since 2016, Deni is General Editor for the 'Competition Law of the European Union' treatise published by LexisNexis, succeeding the leading Competition Law Professor, Valentine Korah. Deni has been invited to the judicial training programme of the European Commission and as a guest lecturer in many institutions. Prior to joining academia, Deni worked as a trainee lawyer and qualified to practice law in Greece (Athens Bar Association).
Despoina Mantzari