Despite several decades' worth of explicit directives, green papers, white papers, proposals, and communications from the European Commission, the actual enforcement of competition law across the Member States today is rife with shifting patterns that escape a clearly bounded framework. The underlying cause of this disarray, the authors of this deeply engaged work contend, lies in a host of legal uncertainties scattered around the intersection where private enforcement encounters the mechanisms of decentralized public enforcement - an area where a number of general as well as special questions of EU competition law, even its very goals and principles, rise into prominence.