It has not yet been mentioned on this blog that the Münchener Kommentar zum Bürgerlichen Gesetzbuch, Vols. 11 and 12, is now available in its seventh edition (2018). This work is a standard treatise not only on German private international law, but on European PIL as well. Read more
A working paper authored by Prof. Dr. Dres. h.c. Burkhard Hess, where he contests with strong arguments the suitability of the Lugano Convention (2007) to serve as a bridge between the UK and the EU after Brexit, has just been published at the MPI Luxembourg Working-Paper Series:
In the current discussion on the post-Brexit judicial cooperation in civil and commercial matters, many consider the ratification of the 2007 Lugano Convention (LC) by the United Kingdom as a suitable avenue for an alignment of the UK with the current regime of European co-operation. Similarly, the UK government has already shown some sympathy for this option. So far, the European Commission has not endorsed any official position.
The Apostille Handbook was originally published in the official languages of the Hague Conference, English and French, and is also available in Greek, Spanish, and Vietnamese. All language versions are available here.
Last year we posted about an upcoming conference at the University of Sydney Law School on Commercial Issues in Private International Law. The programme for the conference, which will take place on 16 February 2018, is now available here.
Professor Andrew Dickinson, University of Oxford, and Professor TM Yeo, Singapore Management University, will give the keynote addresses.
Conference registration can be carried out via this link.
Readers of this blog might be interested in Roxana Banu, “A Relational Feminist Approach to Conflict of Laws” (2017) 24 Mich. J. Gender & L. 1. It can be accessed through SSRN at this location.
The specific context is transnational surrogacy arrangements, but much of the article goes beyond that to other areas of the field more generally. The article engages with work by several other scholars who write about theories or philosophies of private international law.
The Abstract is below.
—
Following the entry into force of the new Insolvency Regulation across the European Union in June 2017, the MPI Luxembourg has released a book guiding practitioners and national lawmakers through the implementation of the new rules. The title corresponds to volume 10 of the Studies of the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for International, European 
and Regulatory Procedural Law collection (320 pp., ISBN 978-3-8487-4448-0).
The book is the result of a 2-year research project, co-funded by the European Commission under the Specific Programme “Civil Justice” and co-led by the MPI Luxembourg together with the Universities of Vienna and Milano. The project aimed to evaluate the changes that were brought to the European Insolvency Regulation in order to keep pace with the substantial developments in domestic law.
Approaches to Procedural Law. The Pluralism of Methods, edited by Professors Loïc Cadiet, Burkhard Hess and Marta Requejo Isidro (552 pp., ISBN 978-3-8487-4309-4) corresponds to volume 9 of the Studies of the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for International, European and Regulatory Procedural Law collection.
As explained in the foreword the book is the final outcome of the second edition of the MPI-IAPL Post-doctoral Summer School in procedural law, which took place at the Max Planck Institute premises in July 2016. Guiding thread of the book are two complementary reflections: On the one hand, modern procedural law is characterized by its openness to comparative and international perspectives. On the other hand, the aperture of procedural science requires a new approach of research, which has to be based on a comparative methodology. In this context, particular attention was paid to recent trends characterizing the field: Europeanization and harmonization, marking the evolution towards a new, cross-border dimension of Procedural Law; and the growing importance of transnational legal relations in all spheres of civil and commercial which obliges to face the new challenges of procedural law across national borders.
It is my pleasure to announce in this and the following entries the publication of three new volumes of the Studies of the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for International, European and Regulatory Procedural Law, starting with volume 8, edited by Professors B. Hess and X. Kramer.
2017, 486 p., ISBN 978-3-8487-4219-6
Abstract:
What road should procedural innovation take? Twenty years after the adoption of the extended competence in the area of judicial cooperation under the Amsterdam Treaty, numerous instruments on European civil procedure have been developed and enacted by the EU legislature, and applied by national courts. There is no doubt that these instruments have built a genuine Judicial Area where citizens and businesses can rely on operating justice systems and functioning cross-border cooperation. While it remains important to study these legislative instruments and, where necessary, to establish new instruments, civil procedure in the EU has entered a new era in which the development of common standards and best practices in the Member States and at the EU level are of the essence.
Symeon Symeonides has posted on SSRN his 31st annual survey of American choice-of-law cases. The survey covers appellate cases decided by American state and federal courts during 2017. It can be found here https://ssrn.com/abstract=3093709 The table of contents is reproduced below.
Symeonides has also posted his annual Private International Law Bibliography for 2017. It can be found here https://ssrn.com/abstract=3094215.
31st Choice-of-Law Survey Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I. Jurisdiction
Part II. Extraterritoriality (or Non) of Federal Law
A compendium of country reports on the law on the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments in ASEAN, Australia, China, India, Japan and South Korea has been published by the Asian Business Law Institute, a research institute based in Singapore. The list of contributors reads as follows: