As the current term of the United States Supreme Court winds-down, two decisions remain outstanding that are of some interest to the readers of this site. The first pending case is Abbott v. Abbott, which was argued in January. As previewed at length on this site (

The Supreme Court of the United States heard argument in Abbott v. Abbott this past week. Abbott is the rare family-law case before the Supreme Court involving an American child taken to Texas from his home in Chile by his mother, without his father’s consent. Under the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of […]

The Supreme Court has long-extolled a federal policy favoring liberal enforcement of forum selection clauses and has held that such clauses “should control absent a strong showing that [they] should be set aside.” Carnival Cruise Lines, Inc. v. Shute, 499 U.S. 585, 587, 591 (1991); M/S Bremen v. Zapata Off-Shore Co., 407 U.S. 1, 10, […]

The Federal Circuit this week has taken a side in a long-running circuit split over the burden of proving the applicability of Fed. R. Civ. P. 4(k)(2), the federal long-arm statute that provides for service and personal jurisdiction for federal causes of action whenever a foreign defendant is not amenable to suit in any one […]

Elena Kagan, the new Solicitor General of the United States, had a few notable private international law cases on her desk when she arrived at her new job this past March. By then, the Court had invited the views of the Solicitor General in the first Hague Convention case to garner serious attention since Schlunk […]