Second Issue of 2011’s Revue Critique de Droit International Privé

The last issue of the Revue critique de droit international privé was just released. It contains three articles and several casenotes. The full table of contents can be found here.

In a first article, Pascal de Vareilles Sommieres, who is a professor of law at Paris I Pantheon Sorbonne University, explores the relationship between international mandatory rules and policy (Lois de police et politiques legislatives). The English asbtract reads:

Still somewhat ill-defined the role of legal policy, which is irrelevant in the determination of ordinary private law rules in Savigny’s methodology, is of course a decisive element in characterization of mandatory rules, as a definition of their scope. In conflict of laws, policy considerations occupy a more significant place when the mandatory rule emanates from the legal system of the forum then when it is a foreign rule. In conflict of jurisdiction, policy requirements of varying intensity have to compose with other considerations of judicial administration, so that each mandatory rule exerts its own specific impact, whether on the jurisdiction of the court or on the status of foreign judgments.

In the second article, Petra Hammje, who is a professor of law at the University of Cergy-Pontoise, offers a survey of the new Rome III Regulation (Le nouveau reglement (UE) no 1259/2010 du Conseil du 20 décembre 2010 mettant en oeuvre une coopération renforcée dans le domaine de la loi applicable au divorce et à la séparation de corps).

Finally, in the last article, Horatia Muir Watt, who is a professor of law at the Paris Institute of Political Science (Science Po) discusses the implications of the Chevron litigation (Chevron, l’enchevetrement des fors. Un combat sans issue ?). I am grateful to the author for providing me with the following abstract:

A decade after the dismissal of their claim by US courts for forum non conveniens and the victims’ return to Ecuador, a new act of the Chevron (Texaco) drama began when the local court gave judgment in early 2011 against the multinational for its role in the environmental pollution in the Amazon forest region and its harmful consequences for the health of its indigenous population. Various strategies are currently being deployed internationally with a view to resist, neutralise or invalidate this judgment (in the form of a worldwide anti-suit injunction, a RICO action, or the invocation of international investment law) before the US court or in international arbitration. In this complex game where multiple fora make simultaneous claim to autority and engage in its mutual neutralisation, the reassuring traditional liberal model of international legal order is clearly out-of-step. The lesson of Chevron case is that it is time to quit the Westphalian perspective so that private international law may assume a useful role in global governance.

Subscribers of Dalloz can download the Revue here.