Transformative Competition Law Adjudication – A Coherent Adjudicative Framework for South Africa.

Competition law today is at an inflection point. In recent years, there has been a marked proliferation of its goals to address global challenges – extending beyond efficiency and consumer welfare to inclusion, transformation, sustainability, and other societal concerns. These are legitimate normative ambitions, yet neither reliance on consumer welfare and efficiency alone nor the unstructured embrace of multiple objectives provides a coherent basis for adjudication. The core difficulty is the absence of a principled framework to guide interpretation and reconciliation of these aims. South Africa offers a vivid illustration. Its Competition Act mandates ambitious statutory objectives, yet in practice adjudication has produced fragmented jurisprudence: some decisions retreat into narrow economic orthodoxy, while others elevate public interest concerns without principled integration. The result is incoherence, vulnerability to politicisation, and erosion of legitimacy. This talk argues that competition law can only be fit for purpose if adjudicators and enforcers adopt a coherent interpretive model capable of balancing competing objectives. The presentation outlines such a model, grounded in proportionality analysis, and considers its implications for South Africa and for broader debates on the future of competition law.