Views
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Conflict of Laws
by Tobias Lutzi, University of Cologne
Since the sad news of her passing, lawyers all around the world have mourned the loss of one of the most iconic and influential members of the legal profession and a true champion of gender equality. Through her work as a scholar and a justice, just as much as through her personal struggles and achievements, Ruth Bader Ginsburg has inspired generations of lawyers.
On top of being a global icon of women’s rights and a highly influential voice on a wide range of issues, Ginsburg has also expressed her views on questions relating to the interaction between different legal systems, both within the US and internationally, on several occasions. In fact, two of her early law-review articles focus entirely on two perennial problems of private international law.
Accordingly, readers of this blog may enjoy to go through some of her writings in this area, both judicial and extra-judicial, in an attempt to pay tribute to her work.
Jurisdiction
In one of Ginsburg’s earliest publications, The Competent Court in Private International Law: Some Observations on Current Views in the United States (20 (1965) Rutgers Law Review 89), she retraces the approach to the adjudication of persons outside the forum state in US law by reference to both the common law and continental European approaches. She argues that
[t]he law in the United States has […] moved closer to the continental approach to the extent that a relationship between the defendant or the particular litigation and the forum, rather than personal service, may function as the basis of the court’s adjudicatory authority.
Ginsburg points out, though, that each approach includes ‘exorbitant’ bases of judicial competence, which ‘provide for adjudication resulting in a personal judgment in cases in which there may be no connection of substance between the litigation and the forum state.’
Bases of judicial competence found in the internal laws of certain continental states, but generally considered undesirable in the international sphere, include competence founded exclusively on the nationality of the plaintiff – for example, Article 14 of the French Civil Code – and competence (to render a personal judgment) based on the mere presence of an asset of the defendant when the claim has no connection with that asset-a basis found in the procedural codes of Germany, Austria, and the Scandinavian countries. Equally undesirable in the view of continental jurists is the traditional Anglo-American rule that personal service within the territory of the forum confers adjudicatory authority upon a court even in the case of a defendant having no contact with the forum other than transience
The ‘most promising currently feasible remedy’ for improper use of these ‘internationally undesirable’ bases of jurisdiction, she argues, is the doctrine of forum non conveniens.
At the least, a plaintiff who chooses such a forum should be required to show some reasonable justification for his institution of the action in the forum state rather than in a state with which the defendant or the res, act or event in suit is more significantly connected.
Applicable Law
As a Supreme Court justice, Ginsburg also had numerous opportunities to rule on conflicts between federal and state law.
In Honda Motor Co v Oberg (512 U.S. 415 (1994)), for instance, Ginsburg dissented from the Court’s decision that an amendment to the Oregon Constitution that prevented review of a punitive-damage award violated the Due Process Clause of the federal Constitution, referring to other protections against excessive punitive-damage awards in Oregon law. In BMW of North America, Inc v Gore (517 US 559 (1996)), she dissented from another decision reviewing an allegedly excessive punitive-damages award and argued that the Court should ‘resist unnecessary intrusion into an area dominantly of state concern.’
According to Paul Schiff Berman (who provided a much more complete account of Ginsburg’s relevant writings than this post can offer in Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Interaction of Legal Systems (in Dodson (ed), The Legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (CUP 2015) 151)), her ‘willingness to defer to state prerogatives in interpreting state law […] may surprise those who focus on Justice Ginsburg’s Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence in gender-related cases.’
The same deference can also be found in some of her writings on the interplay between US law and other legal systems, though. In a speech to the International Academy of Comparative Law, she argued in favour of taking foreign and international experiences into account when interpreting US law and concluded:
Recognizing that forecasts are risky, I nonetheless believe the US Supreme Court will continue to accord “a decent Respect to the Opinions of [Human]kind” as a matter of comity and in a spirit of humility. Comity, because projects vital to our well being […] require trust and cooperation of nations the world over. And humility because, in Justice O’Connor’s words: “Other legal systems continue to innovate, to experiment, and to find . . . solutions to the new legal problems that arise each day, [solutions] from which we can learn and benefit.”
Recognition of Judgments
Going back to another one of Ginsburg’s early publications, in Judgments in Search of Full Faith and Credit: The Last-in-Time Rule for Conflicting Judgments (82 (1969) Harvard Law Review 798), Ginsburg discussed the problem of the hierarchy between conflicting judgments from different states and made a case for ‘the unifying function of the full faith and credit clause’. As to whether anti-suit injunctions should also the clause, she expressed a more nuanced view, though, explaining that
[t]he current state of the law, permitting the injunction to issue but not compelling any deference outside the rendering state, may be the most reasonable compromise […].
The thesis of this article, that the national full faith and credit policy should override the local interest of the enjoining state, would leave to the injunction a limited office. It would operate simply to notify the state in which litigation has been instituted of the enjoining state’s appraisal of forum conveniens. That appraisal, if sound, might induce respect for the injunction as a matter of comity.
Ginsburg had an opportunity to revisit a similar question about thirty years later, when delivering the opinion of the Court in Baker v General Motor Corp (522 US 222 (1998)). Although the Full Faith and Credit Clause was not subject to a public-policy exception (as held by the District Court), an injunction stipulated in settlement of a case in front of a Michigan court could not prevent a Missouri court from hearing a witness in completely unrelated proceedings:
Michigan lacks authority to control courts elsewhere by precluding them, in actions brought by strangers to the Michigan litigation, from determining for themselves what witnesses are competent to testify and what evidence is relevant and admissible in their search for the truth.
This conclusion creates no general exception to the full faith and credit command, and surely does not permit a State to refuse to honor a sister state judgment based on the forum’s choice of law or policy preferences. Rather, we simply recognize that, just as the mechanisms for enforcing a judgment do not travel with the judgment itself for purposes of Full Faith and Credit […] and just as one State’s judgment cannot automatically transfer title to land in another State […] similarly the Michigan decree cannot determine evidentiary issues in a lawsuit brought by parties who were not subject to the jurisdiction of the Michigan court.
According to Berman, this line of reasoning is testimony to Ginsburg’s judicial vision of ‘a system in which courts respect each other’s authority and judgments.’
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The above selection has been created rather spontaneously and is evidently far from complete; please feel free to use the comment section to highlight other interesting parts of Justice Ginsburg’s work.
The Bee That’s Buzzing in Our Bonnets. Some Thoughts about Characterisation after the Advocate General’s Wikingerhof Opinion
Last week, AG Saugmandsgaard Øe rendered his Opinion on Case C-59/19 Wikingerhof, which we first reported in this post by Krzysztof Pacula. The following post has been written by Michiel Poesen, PhD Candidate at KU Leuven, who has been so kind as to share with us some further thoughts on the underlying problem of characterisation.
Characterisation is not just a bee that has been buzzing in conflicts scholars’ bonnets, as Forsyth observed in his 1998 LQR article. Given its central role in how we have been thinking about conflicts for over a century, it has pride of place in jurisprudence and literature. The Wikingerhof v Booking.com case (C-59/19) is the latest addition to a long string of European cases concerning the characterisation of actions as ‘matters relating to a contract’ under Article 7(1) of the Brussels Ia Regulation n° 1215/2012.
Earlier this week, Krzysztof Pacula surveyed Advocate General Saugmandsgaard Øe’s opinion in the Wikingerhof case on this blog (Geert Van Calster also wrote about the opinion on his blog). Readers can rely on their excellent analyses of the facts and the AG’s legal analysis. This post has a different focus, though. The Wikingerhof case is indicative of a broader struggle with characterising claims that are in the grey area surrounding a contract. In this post, I would like to map briefly the meandering approaches to characterisation under the contract jurisdiction. Then I would like to sketch a conceptual framework that captures the key elements of characterisation.
1. Not All ‘Matters Relating to a Contract’ Are Created Equal
There are around 30 CJEU decisions concerning the phrase ‘matters relating to a contract’. Three tests for characterisation are discernible in those decisions. In the first approach, characterisation depends on the nature of the legal basis relied on by the claimant. If a claim is based on an obligation freely assumed, then the claim is a matter relating to a contract to which the contract jurisdiction applies. Statutory, fiduciary, or tortious obligations arising due to the conclusion of a contract are also contractual obligations for private international law purposes. I will call this approach the ‘cause of action test’, because it centres on the nature of the cause of action pleaded by the claimant. In recent decisions, for example, the cause of action test has been used to characterise claims between third parties as contractual matters (C-337/17 Feniks, blogged here; C-772/17 Reitbauer, blogged here; joined cases C-274/16, C-447/16 and C-448/16 flightright).
The second approach to characterisation is to focus on the relationship between the litigants. From this standpoint, only claims between litigants who are bound by a contract can be characterised as ‘matters relating to a contract’. This approach has for example been used in the Handte and Réunion européenne decisions. We will call it the ‘privity test’. Sometimes scholars relied on this test to argue that all claims between contracting parties are to be characterised as matters relating to a contract.
The third and final approach emphasises the nature of the facts underlying the claim brought by the claimant. This approach was first developed in the Brogsitter decision (C-548/12). However, it is predated by AG Jacob’s opinions in the Kalfelis (C-189/87) and Shearson Lehmann Hutton (C-89/91) cases (which since have been eagerly picked up by the Bundesgerichtshof of Germany). The Brogsitter decision provided that a claim is a contractual matter if the defendant’s allegedly wrongful behaviour can reasonably be regarded to be a breach of contract, which will be the case if the interpretation of the contract is indispensable to judge. I will dub this approach the ‘factual breach test’, since it directs attention to factual elements such as the defendant’s behaviour and the indispensability to interpret the contract. It is plain to see that this is by far the most complicated of the three approaches to characterisation we discussed here (among other things because of the unclear relation between the different layers of which the test is composed, an issue that AG Saugmandsgaard Øe entertained in Wikingerhof, [69]–[70], and C-603/17 Bosworth v Arcadia).
The use in practice and literature of the three approaches laid out above demonstrates a tale of casuistry. Similar claims have been subjected to different approaches, and approaches developed in a specific setting have been applied to entirely different contexts. For example, a few CJEU decisions characterised claims between litigants who are not privy to consensual obligations as non-contractual in nature under the privity test. Other decisions characterised such claims as contractual in nature, applying the cause of action test. A similar dichotomy underlies the characterisation of claims between contracting parties. Initially, the CJEU jurisprudence applied the cause of action test, focussing on the nature of the legal basis relied on (see C-9/87 Arcado v Haviland). Later, the Brogsitter decision adopted the factual breach test, which shifted the focus to the nature of the facts underlying the claim.
It is difficult to understand why these divergences have occurred. How can they be explained?
2. The Theories Underlying Characterisation
A good way to start is to conceptualise characterisation further along the lines of this scheme:
Seen from the perspective of this scheme, the previous section described three ‘tests for characterisation’. A ‘test for characterisation’ refers to the interpretational exercise that lays down the conditions under which a claim can be characterised as a matter relating to a contract. Each test elevates different elements of a ‘claim’ as relevant for the purpose of characterisation and disregards others. Those elements are the identity of the litigants, the claim’s legal basis, or the dispute underlying the claim. As such, it concretises an idea about the broader purpose the contract jurisdiction should serve, which is called a ‘theory’. The divergences among the tests for characterisation outlined above is explained by the reliance on different theories.
The AG’s considerations about Brogsitter in the Wikingerhof opinion illustrate the scheme. The AG observed that the factual breach test is informed by what I will dub the ‘natural forum theory’. According to that theory, the contract jurisdiction offers the most appropriate and hence natural forum for all claims that are remotely linked to a contract (for the sake of proximity and avoiding multiple jurisdictional openings over claims relating to the same contract). This theory explains why the factual breach test provides such a broad, hypothetical test for characterisation that captures all claims that could have been pleaded as a breach of contract. Opining against the use of the factual breach test and underlying natural forum theory, the AG suggested that the cause of action test be applied. He then integrated the indispensability to interpret the contract (originally a part of the factual breach test) into the cause of action test as a tool for determining whether a claim is based on contract ([90] et seq). Essentially, his approach was informed by what I will call the ‘ring-fencing theory’. In contrast to the natural forum theory, this theory presumes that the contract jurisdiction should be delineated strictly for two reasons. First, the contract jurisdiction is a special jurisdiction regime that cannot fulfil a broad role as a natural forum contractus ([84]–[85]). Second, a strict delineation promotes legal certainty and efficiency, since it does not require judges to engage in a broad, hypothetical analysis to determine whether a claim is contractual or not ([76]–[77]). The scheme was applied succinctly here, but the analysis could be fleshed out for example by integrating the role of the parallelism between the Brussels Ia and Rome I/II Regulations.
The scheme can be used to understand and evaluate the CJEU’s eventual judgment in Wikingerhof. I hope that the decision will be a treasure trove that furthers our understanding of the mechanics of characterisation in EU private international law.
Facebook’s further attempts to resist the jurisdiction of the Federal Court of Australia futile
Earlier in the year, Associate Professor Jeanne Huang reported on the Australian Information Commission’s action against Facebook Inc in the Federal Court of Australia. In particular, Huang covered Australian Information Commission v Facebook Inc [2020] FCA 531, which concerned an ex parte application for service outside of the jurisdiction and an application for substituted service.
In April, Thawley J granted the Commission leave to serve the first respondent (Facebook Inc) in the United States, and the second respondent (Facebook Ireland Ltd) in the Republic of Ireland. Through orders for substituted service, the Commission was also granted leave to serve the relevant documents by email (with respect to Facebook Inc) and by mail (with respect to Facebook Ireland Ltd).
Facebook Inc applied to set aside the orders for its service in the United States, among other things. Facebook Ireland appeared at the hearing of Facebook Inc’s application seeking equivalent orders, although it did not make submissions.
On 14 September, Thawley J refused that application: Australian Information Commissioner v Facebook Inc (No 2) [2020] FCA 1307. The foreign manifestations of Facebook are subject to the Federal Court’s long-arm jurisdiction.
The decision involves an orthodox application of Australian procedure and private international law. The policy represented by the decision is best understood by brief consideration of the context for this litigation.
Background
The Australian Information Commission is Australia’s ‘independent national regulator for privacy and freedom of information’, which promotes and upholds Australians’ rights to access government-held information and to have their personal information protected.
Those legal rights are not as extensive as equivalent rights enjoyed in other places, like the European Union. Australian law offers minimal constitutional or statutory human rights protection at a federal level. Unlike other common law jurisdictions, Australian courts have been reluctant to recognise a right to privacy. Australians’ ‘privacy rights’, in a positivist sense, exist within a rough patchwork of various domestic sources of law.
One of the few clear protections is the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), (‘Privacy Act’), which (among other things) requires large-ish companies to deal with personal information in certain careful ways, consistent with the ‘Australian Privacy Principles’.
In recent years, attitudes towards privacy and data protection seem to have changed within Australian society. To oversimplify: in some quarters at least, sympathies are becoming less American (ie, less concerned with ‘free speech’ above all else), and more European (ie, more concerned about privacy et al). If that description has any merit, then it would be due to events like the notorious Cambridge Analytica scandal, which is the focus of this litigation.
Various manifestations of Australian governments have responded to changing societal attitudes by initiating law reform inquiries. Notably, in 2019, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (‘ACCC’) delivered its final report on its Digital Platforms Inquiry, recommending that Australian law be reformed to better address ‘the implications and consequences of the business models of digital platforms for competition, consumers, and society’. The broad-ranging inquiry considered overlapping issues in data protection, competition and consumer protection—including reform of the Privacy Act. The Australian Government agreed with the ACCC that Australian privacy laws ought to be strengthened ‘to ensure they are fit for purpose in the digital age’. A theme of this report is that the foreign companies behind platforms like Facebook should be better regulated to serve the interests of Australian society.
Another important part of the context for this Facebook case is Australia’s media environment. Australia’s ‘traditional’ media companies—those that produce newspapers and television—are having a hard time. Their business models have been undercut by ‘digital platforms’ like Facebook and Google. Many such traditional media companies are owned by News Corp, the conglomerate driven by sometime-Australian Rupert Murdoch (who is responsible for Fox News. On behalf of Australia: sorry everyone). These companies enjoy tremendous power in the Australian political system. They have successfully lobbied the Australian government to force the foreign companies behind digital platforms like Google to pay Australian companies for news.
All of this is to say: now more than ever, there is regulatory appetite and political will in Australia to hold Facebook et al accountable.
Procedural history
Against that backdrop, in March 2020, the Commission commenced proceedings against each of the respondents in the Federal Court, alleging ‘that the personal information of Australian Facebook users was disclosed to the This is Your Digital Life app for a purpose other than the purpose for which the information was collected, in breach of the Privacy Act’.
The Commissioner alleges that:
- Facebook disclosed the users’ personal information for a purpose other than that for which it was collected, in breach Australian Privacy Principle (‘APP’) 6;
- Facebook failed to take reasonable steps to protect the users’ personal information from unauthorised disclosure in breach of APP 11.1(b); and
- these breaches amounted to serious and/or repeated interferences with the privacy of the users, in contravention of s 13G of the Privacy Act.
In April, the service orders reported by Huang were made. Facebook Inc and Facebook Ireland were then served outside of the jurisdiction.
Facebook’s challenge to the orders for service outside of the jurisdiction: ‘no prima facie case’
Facebook Inc contended that service should be set aside because the Court should not be satisfied that there was a prima facie case for the relief claimed by the Commissioner as required by r 10.43(4)(c) of the Federal Court Rules 2011 (Cth).
The Court summarised the principles applicable to setting aside an order as to service as follows (at [23]):
- An application for an order discharging an earlier order granting leave to serve out of the jurisdiction, or for an order setting aside such service, is in the nature of a review by way of rehearing of the original decision to grant leave to serve out of the jurisdiction.
- It is open to the party who sought and obtained an order for service out of the jurisdiction to adduce additional evidence, and make additional submissions.
- The onus remains on the applicant in the proceedings to satisfy the Court in light of the material relied upon, including any additional material relied upon, that leave ought to have been granted.
Facebook Inc accepted that although demonstrating a prima facie case is ‘not particularly onerous’, the Commissioner had failed to establish an arguable case; she had merely posited ‘inferences’ which did not reasonably arise from the material tendered: [28]-[29].
As noted above, the underlying ‘case’ that was the subject of that argument is in relation to the Cambridge Analytica scandal and alleged breaches of the Privacy Act.
The case thus turns on application of an Australian statute to seemingly cross-border circumstances. Rather than having regard to forum choice-of-law rules, the parties seemingly accepted that the case turns on statutory interpretation. The extra-territorial application of the Privacy Act depends on an organisation having an ‘Australian Link’. Section 5B(3) relevantly provides:
(3) An organisation or small business operator also has an Australian link if all of the following apply: …
(b) the organisation or operator carries on business in Australia or an external Territory;
(c) the personal information was collected or held by the organisation or operator in Australia or an external Territory, either before or at the time of the act or practice.
Facebook Inc argued that the Commissioner failed to establish a prima facie case that, at the relevant time, Facebook Inc:
- carried on business in Australia within the meaning of s 5B(3)(b) of the Privacy Act; or
- collected or held personal information in Australia within the meaning of s 5B(3)(c) of the Privacy Act.
Facebook Inc carries on business in Australia
In Tiger Yacht Management Ltd v Morris (2019) 268 FCR 548 (noted here), the Full Court of the Federal Court of Australia ‘observed that the expression “carrying on business” may have a different meaning in different contexts and that, where used to ensure jurisdictional nexus, the meaning will be informed by the requirement for there to be sufficient connection with the country asserting jurisdiction’: [40].
The Court considered the statutory context of the Commissioner’s case, being the application of Australian privacy laws to foreign entities. The Court had regard to the objects of the Privacy Act, which include promotion of the protection of privacy of individuals and responsible and transparent handling of personal information by entities: Privacy Act s 2A(b), (d). Whether Facebook Inc ‘carries on business in Australia’ for the purposes of the Privacy Act is a factual inquiry that should be determined with reference to those broader statutory purposes.
The Commissioner advanced several arguments in support of the proposition that Facebook Inc carries on business in Australia.
One argument advanced by the Commissioner was that Facebook Inc had financial control of foreign subsidiaries carrying on business in Australia, suggesting that the parent company was carrying on business in Australia. (Cf Tiger Yacht, above.) That argument was rejected: [155].
Another argument turned on agency more explicitly. Essentially, the Commissioner sought to pierce the corporate veil by arguing Facebook is ‘a single worldwide business operated by multiple entities’: [75]. Those entities contract with one another so that different aspects of the worldwide business are attributed to different entities, but the court ought to pierce the jurisdictional veil. The Commissioner submitted that ‘the performance pursuant to the contractual arrangements by Facebook Inc of functions necessary for Facebook Ireland to provide the Facebook service…, including in Australia, indicated that Facebook Ireland was a convenient entity through which Facebook Inc carried on business in Australia during the relevant period’: [115].
Facebook Inc appealed to cases like Adams v Cape Industries [1990] 1 Ch 433, where the English Court of Appeal explained that, typically, a company would not be considered to be carrying on business within the forum unless: ‘(a) it has a fixed place of business of its own in this country from which it has carried on business through servants or agents, or (b) it has had a representative here who has had the power to bind it by contract and who has carried on business at or from a fixed place of business in this country’ (at 529). (See also Lucasfilm Ltd v Ainsworth [2008] EWHC 1878 (Ch).)
Ultimately, the Court was not satisfied that Facebook Inc carried on business within Australia on the basis that Facebook Ireland conducted Facebook Inc’s business in Australia: [117]. More accurately, the Commissioner had not established a prima facie case to that effect.
But the Commissioner had established a prima facie case that Facebook Inc directly carried on business within Australia.
Facebook Inc is responsible for various ‘processing operations’ in relation to the Facebook platform, which includes responsibility for installing, operating and removing cookies on the devices of Australian users. Facebook Inc appealed to case authority to argue that this activity did not amount to carrying on business in Australia. The Court thus considered cases like Dow Jones v Gutnick (2002) 210 CLR 575 and Valve Corporation v Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (2017) 258 FCR 190, which each addressed the territorial aspects of businesses that depend on communication on the internet.
The Court rejected Facebook Inc’s argument that ‘installing’ cookies is to be regarding as equivalent to uploading and downloading a document (cf Gutnick). At the interlocutory stage of the proceeding, there was not enough evidence to accept Facebook Inc’s claim; but there was enough to draw the inference that the installation and operation of cookies within Australia involves activity in Australia.
The Court concluded: ‘the Commissioner has discharged her onus of establishing that it is arguable, and the inference is open to be drawn, that some of the data processing activities carried on by Facebook Inc can be regarded as having occurred in Australia, notwithstanding that the evidence did not establish that any employee of Facebook Inc was physically located in Australia’: [137]. It was thus concluded that the Commissioner had established a prima facie case that Facebook Inc carried on business within Australia: [156]. (Cf the reasoning of Canadian courts that led to Google Inc v Equustek Solutions Inc [2017] 1 SCR 824, noted here.)
Facebook Inc collected or held personal information in Australia
The Court was assisted by responses provided by Facebook Inc to questions of the Commissioner made pursuant to her statutory powers of investigation. One question concerned the location and ownership of servers used to provide the Facebook service. Although Facebook Inc’s answer was somewhat equivocal, it suggested that the platform depends on servers located in Australia (including network equipment and caching servers) to improve connection and delivery time. This was enough for the Court to make the relevant inference as to collection and holding of personal information within Australia: [170].
The Court had regard to the purposes manifested by the Explanatory Memorandum to the Privacy Act in concluding that ‘the fact that the personal information is uploaded in Australia and stored on Australian users’ devices and browser caches and on caching servers arguably owned or operated by Facebook Inc in Australia, it is arguable that Facebook Inc collected the personal information in Australia’: [185].
Combined with the findings as to carrying on business, this was enough to establish a prima facie case that the extra-territorial application of the Privacy Act was engaged. The Court’s orders as to service were not disturbed.
Concluding remarks
The interlocutory character of this decision should be emphasised. The Court’s findings on the territorial aspects of ‘carrying on business’ and data collection were each subject to the ‘prima facie case’ qualification. These are issues of fact; the Court may find differently after a thorough ventilation of evidence yet to be adduced.
This decision is not anomalous. The assertion of long-arm jurisdiction over Facebook Inc indicates Australian courts’ increasing willingness to pierce the jurisdictional veil for pragmatic ends. In my experience, most Australian lawyers do not really care about the multilateralist ideals of many private international law enthusiasts. The text of the Australian statutes that engage the case before them is paramount. Lawyers are directed to consider the text of the statute in light of its context and purpose: Australian Securities and Investments Commission v King (2020) 94 ALJR 293, [23]; Acts Interpretation Act 1901 (Cth) s 15AA. Essentially, in the case of a forum statute with putative extraterritorial operation, a form of interest analysis is mandated.
I am OK with this. If the policy of the Privacy Act is to have any chance of success, it depends on its application to internet intermediaries comprised of corporate groups with operations outside of Australia. As an island continent in a technologically interconnected world, the policy of Australian substantive law will increasingly determine the policy of Australian private international law.
Michael Douglas is Senior Lecturer at UWA Law School and Consultant at Bennett + Co, Perth.
News
Certificat de coutume: New volume in French
Gustavo Cerqueira, Nicolas Nord, and Cyril Nourissat have recently edited a new volume on the “Certificat de coutume – Pratiques en droit des affaires internationales” (in French). The editors have kindly provided us with an English translation of the blurb available on the publisher’s website:
Read more
Seminar series Crossroads in Private International Law
The Centre for Private international Law of the University of Aberdeen’s Law School is continuing this year its series on Crossroads in Private International Law.
The aim of the series is to explore the intersection between Private International Law and substantive areas of law, with the outcome of featuring cutting edge interdisciplinary research carried out by the Centre members.
The format is hybrid, with presentations and room for discussion. Find out more and register for the individual events here; and sign up for selected seminars of for the entire series here.
EAPIL Winter School in European Private International Law (12–16 Feb 2024 in Como, Italy)
In cooperation with the Department of Law, Economics and Cultures of the University of Insubria (Italy), the Law Faculty of the University of Murcia (Spain) and the Law Faculty of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków (Poland), the European Association for Private International Law (EAPIL) has created a Winter School in European Private International Law.
The School’s inaugural session will take place from 12 to 16 February 2024 at the University of Insubria, in the cloister of the Basilica di Sant’Abbondio in Como, Italy. It will dedicated to the topic of ‘Personal Status and Family Relationships’. More information on the programme, which has been put together by Silvia Marino (University of Insubria), Javier Carrascosa González (University of Murcia), and Anna Wysocka-Bar (Jagiellonian University in Kraków), can be found on the official flyer. More information on the registration process can also be found here.
The organisers are also offering a teaser seminar on 4 December 2023, at 6pm (Italian time), which can be joined here.