Bejcek, Josef --- "On Words and on Shifting their Meaning – Comment on Nihoul" [2012] ELECD 413; in Zimmer, Daniel (ed), "The Goals of Competition Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: The Goals of Competition Law

Editor(s): Zimmer, Daniel

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9780857936608

Section: Chapter 13

Section Title: On Words and on Shifting their Meaning – Comment on Nihoul

Author(s): Bejcek, Josef

Number of pages: 11

Extract:

13. On words and on shifting their
meaning ­ comment on Nihoul
Josef Bejcek*

1 THE WORDS THEMSELVES DO NOT MATTER
VERY MUCH

Paul Nihoul puts, in his contribution, a somewhat strange and surprising
question in general terms ­ namely whether the words do matter; it calls,
at first glance, for a self-evident and not surprising answer: `Of course,
they do.'
We as lawyers are not presumed to have the privilege of poets allowed
to belittle words, though using them as a tool of expression of their
thoughts and feelings: `What's in a name? that which we call a rose /
By any other name would smell as sweet' (Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet).
Nevertheless even we can sometimes witness efforts of changing word (in
a legal text) in order to change the world. But this clumsy direct way is not
inevitable. There is a more comfortable trick available, for the words are
pretty flexible, elastic and `stretchy'.
I suppose as competition lawyers we have more often experienced that
things change despite the same wording of legal texts under the influence
of different accents of decision-making and of the pressure of factual
competition policy.1
It is as if the old medieval dispute between nominalism and realism had
come back. The nominalistic approach is that the concepts do not exist in
the words; they are instead hidden behind the words as the symbols of the
concept.


* Professor of Commercial Law, Masaryk University Brno, Head
of Department of Commercial Law at the ...