Stefan on the Political Economy of Extraterritoriality

Paul B. Stefan III, who is the John C. Jeffries Jr. Distinguished Professor at the University of Virginia Law School, has posted the Political Economy of Extraterritoriality on SSRN. The asbtract reads:

I want to use the occasion of the Morrison decision to consider the interests that produce extraterritorial regulation by the United States. International lawyers for the most part have analyzed state decisions to exercise prescriptive jurisdiction over extraterritorial transactions in terms of a welfare calculus that determines the likely costs and benefits to the state as a whole. Fewer studies have considered the political economy of the decision whether to regulate foreign transactions. No work of which I am aware has considered the political economy of deciding the extraterritorial question through litigation. This paper seeks to fill these gaps by sketching out what political economy suggests both about extraterritoriality and the role of courts as arbiters of regulatory scope.