Second Issue of 2008’s Revue Critique de Droit Int’l Privé

The second issue of the French Revue Critique de Droit International Privé was released some time ago. It contains one article and several case commentaries. A table of contents can be found here.

The title of the article is the Forum of Necessity (Le for de nécessité : tableau comparatif et évolutif). It discusses this head of jurisdiction which seems peculiar to the civil law of conflicts in respect of Belgian, Swiss, French and Dutch international private law. The authors are Valentin Rétornaz, a research assistant at Neuchatel university (Switzerland), and Bart Volders, a member of the Brussels bar and an adjunct professor to the university of Anvers, Belgium. The English abstract reads:

This study contains a comparative analysis of the institution known as the « forum of necessity ». Familiar to many legal systems and given pride of place in several codes of private international law, it allows a court normally without jurisdiction over a case, to decide it nevertheless in order to avoid a denial of justice. The principle behind it is an elementary principle of justice according to which no cause of action should be refused access to a court. The simplicity of such an objective may be deceptive insofar as the means to achieve it are concerned. The « forum of necessity » may indeed be difficult to manage in concrete circumstances, as the cases examined here well show. This study first attempts to draw from the main legal texts and academic writings its general characteristics and the conditions under which it allows a court to exercise jurisdiction. Then, cases and specific commentaries are examined in order to formulate some general principles.