The Organization of American States (OAS) is organizing a virtual forum as noted in the poster above. It will take place on Monday 24 May 2021 at 11 am (Washington D.C., USA time). For more information, click here.

This event will be held in Spanish only and is free of charge. The event will also be streamed live via social media networks.

This event follows an important and recent milestone of the OAS in which the Inter-American Juridical Committee completed its 98th Regular Session approving the Principles on Privacy and Protection of Personal Data and supporting the Hague Principles on the Choice of Law Applicable to International Commercial Contracts. Click here for the specific resolution (9 April 2021) and here for general information.

In February 2019, the Inter-American Juridical Committee adopted the “Guide on the Law Applicable to International Commercial Contracts in the Americas.”

The latest issue of RabelsZ has just been published. It features the following articles:

The Law and Economics of Extreme Sports Sponsoring in Comparative Perspective. – This article investigates the law and economics of extreme sports sponsoring in a comparative perspective. It is based on 40 structured interviews with sponsored athletes from various common law and civil law jurisdictions. The article demonstrates that the current contracting practice is unbalanced and inefficient. It entices athletes to take unreasonably high risks. There are ways to significantly increase the cooperative surplus compared to the status quo. The article further demonstrates that sponsor firms face increased and mandatory duties of care towards young and/or inexperienced athletes. In particular, such athletes should not be influenced by bonus systems in their risk-taking behaviour. The duties of care of a sponsor under contract and/or tort law are also determined by the degree of control exercised by a sponsor and the economic dependence of the athlete on the sponsor. This allows creating a finely tuned regulatory system that, unlike the dichotomy of an independent contractor and dependent worker, is better able to do justice to individual cases.

Arnald J. Kanning: Unification of Commercial Contract Law: The Role of the Dominant Economy, Volume 85 (2021) / Issue 2, pp. 326-356 (31), DOI: 10.1628/rabelsz-2021-0003

This paper is about the unification of commercial contract law. Showing that the legal rules preferred by the “dominant economy” frequently end up in uniform commercial contract laws does not show that those legal rules are inherently superior to any other legal rules. It will be argued that approval of a uniform commercial contract law by the “dominant economy” is the environmental factor that is crucial to its ultimate success, independent of the innate quality of the legal rules preferred by the “dominant economy”. Within the conceptual framework of historical and comparative institutional analysis (HCIA), a study is offered of several well-known attempts to unify (and codify) divergent bodies of commercial contract law in the past two centuries. The argument is not so much that the American UCC Article 2 on Sales greatly influenced the CISG as that United States adoption of the CISG was crucial to its ultimate success, independent of the innate quality of the legal rules preferred by the United States.

Justus Meyer: Die praktische Bedeutung des UN-Kaufrechts in Deutschland, Volume 85 (2021) / Issue 2, pp. 357-401 (45), DOI: 10.1628/rabelsz-2021-0004

The Practical Significance of the CISG in Germany. – The UN Sales Law is in different respects a clear success: worldwide, reforms of contract law are oriented towards the CISG. In September 2020 Portugal became the 94th contracting state. The importance of international trade in goods is steadily increasing. However, there is still uncertainty about the acceptance of UN sales law by internationally operating companies and their legal advisors. The present study is based on a survey of 554 attorneys in Germany and compares the answers with results from 2004 as well as from Austria and Switzerland. According to this survey, the international sales contracts heard by courts and arbitrators are predominantly not subject to UN sales law and the proportion of those who regularly use a choice-of-law clause with CISG exclusion has even risen from 42.2 to 52.9 % since 2004. In Austria and Switzerland this proportion has also risen and is even higher than in Germany. Many lawyers are well aware of the advantages of a neutral legal regime. However, it seems to be easier for them to recommend choice-of-law clauses that exclusively invoke domestic law.

Krzysztof Riedl: Natural Obligations in Comparative Perspective, Volume 85 (2021) / Issue 2, pp. 402-433 (32), DOI: 10.1628/rabelsz-2021-0005

A natural obligation (obligatio naturalis) is a legal construction whose roots stretch back to Roman law. This common source means that we will find similar solutions in legal systems descended from Roman legal culture – with respect to both the understanding of natural obligations and specific instances where they arise. The aim of this paper is to answer the question of whether these different systems define natural obligations in the same manner or whether the natural obligations encountered in these systems are distinct legal institutions sharing only a common name. In this paper, the various approaches of contemporary legal systems to this issue are characterized. Then, a comparative-law analysis focuses on three fundamental aspects of natural obligations: their legal construction (definition), a catalogue of instances, and their legal effectiveness. Under the constructional perspective, two basic models of obligatio naturalis are distinguished and discussed – the obligative model and the causal model – and it is around these two models which the particular conceptions converge. The analysis presented in the paper demonstrates that the similarities between the various models outweigh the differences. This permits us to refer to obligatio naturalis as a universal legal construction.

In response to the EU Commission’s formal refusal to allow the UK to accede to the Lugano Convention, a coalation between several NGOs and legal scholars, lead by the European Coalition for Corporate Justice (ECCJ) has issued an open letter, calling upon the EU to reverse this decision. In essence, they argue that a full return to the common-law rules on jurisdiction, including the forum non conveniens doctrine, will reduce access to the UK courts in cases of corporate human-rights abuses, which has only recently been rendered much more attractive by the UK Supreme Court’s decisions in Vedanta v Lungowe [2019] UKSC 20 and Okpabi v Shell [2021] UKSC 3.

The full letter can be found here. It is still open for signatures (via e-mail to christopher.patz[at]corporatejustice.org).

In December 2020, we reported about the Opinion presented by Advocate Generale Campos Sánchez-Bordona in the case Vereniging van Effectenbezitters, C-709/19. Today, the Court delivered its judgment in this case.

In brief, the request for a preliminary ruling arose out of the proceedings pertaining to a collective action for a declaratory judgment brought by an association against an oil and gas company on behalf of investors who bought, held or sold the ordinary shares through an investment account in the Netherlands. The association argued that this internationally listed company acted unlawfully towards its shareholders inasmuch as it made incorrect, incomplete and misleading statements about the circumstances pertaining to, inter alia, an explosion resulting in an oil spill. It is in this context that the referring court requested the Court of Justice to interpret Article 7(2) of the Brussels I bis Regulation.

At the request of the Court, in his Opinion of last December, AG Campos Sánchez-Bordona addressed two first preliminary questions. Thus, the third and fourth preliminary questions on international and internal territorial jurisdiction to hear subsequent individual claims of the investors were not addressed in the Opinion.

Ultimately, the third and fourth questions do not receive a definitive answer in the judgment either. The Court held that these questions are inadmissible as they are of hypothetical nature – in the proceedings pending before the referring court, no subsequent individual claim is concerned (paragraphs 38 and 39).

As to the first and second preliminary questions, these are worded as follows:

(1) (a)      Should Article 7(2) of [the Brussels I bis Regulation] be interpreted as meaning that the direct occurrence of purely financial damage to an investment account in the Netherlands or to an investment account of a bank and/or investment firm established in the Netherlands, damage which is the result of investment decisions influenced by globally distributed but incorrect, incomplete and misleading information from an international listed company, constitutes a sufficient connecting factor for the international jurisdiction of the Netherlands courts by virtue of the location of the occurrence of the damage (“Erfolgsort”)?

(b)      If not, are additional circumstances required to justify the jurisdiction of the Netherlands courts and what are those circumstances? Are the additional circumstances [namely, the fact that the international listed company focuses on global investment public, including the investors in the Netherlands, and the association represents a considerable number of investors in this Member State, the fact that the settlement reached by the international listed company with a number of shareholders in the United States of America was not proposed to the investors represented by the association and, lastly, the fact that the shareholders for whom this association is acting include consumers to whom the Brussels I bis Regulation affords special legal protection] sufficient to found the jurisdiction of the Netherlands courts?

(2)      Would the answer to Question 1 be different in the case of a claim brought under Article 3:305a of the BW by an association the purpose of which is to defend, in its own right, the collective interests of investors who have suffered damage as referred to in Question 1, which means, among other things, that neither the places of domicile of the aforementioned investors, nor the special circumstances of individual purchase transactions or of individual decisions not to sell shares which were already held, have been established?

In its judgment, the Court answered together this questions (paragraph 22) and held that Article 7(2) of the Brussels I bis Regulation must be interpreted to the effect that the direct occurrence, in an investment account, of purely financial damage resulting from investment decisions made on the basis of information which was readily available worldwide, but which was incorrect, incomplete and misleading and emanated from an international listed company, does not allow the international jurisdiction of the court of the Member State in which the bank or investment firm that holds that account is established to be founded on a connection with the place where the damage occurred, where that company was not subject to statutory reporting obligations in that Member State (paragraph 37).

The judgment can be consulted here (the English version is not yet available).