See this post over at Transnational Notes.

Professor Laura Little (Temple University’s Beasley School of Law) is the author of a new U.S. casebook on the Conflict of Laws published in the Aspen Casebook Series.

Though relying essentially on U.S. sources, the casebook contains a number of comparative developments, in particular with European regulations.

About the Book

This progressive new casebook offers a contemporary, practical approach to a subject in which there are few right answers and plenty of opportunity for creativity, by connecting course content to law practice and offering modern cases and a problem pedagogy.

This title features:

• Well-balanced casebook presents the deep jurisprudential lessons imbedded in the conflict of laws subject matter while maintaining a clear presentation of doctrines relevant to current law practice
• Thematic approach puts conflicts of law in the context of actual issues confronted in law practice
• Problem pedagogy helps students apply various approaches and concepts.  Extensive teaching manual outlines detailed answer to each problem. 
• Clear, accessible writing without the “hide the ball” approach of many other books provides accessibility for a difficult course
• Innovative organization, beginning with personal jurisdiction, follows the way issues arise in litigation and highlights the importance of forum selection.  Modular presentation allows professors to adapt book took their own organization
• Contemporary cases and hypotheticals allow students to apply rules to current situations.  Traditional cases are also included so as to maintain continuity with the venerable parts of the discipline
• Full coverage of current topics such as internet issues, same sex marriage, choice of law clauses, and class actions
• International and comparative materials cover global aspects of conflicts
• PowerPoint slides, charts, and diagrams available on line and in teaching manual provide appealing visual tools and add to the books’ teachability
• Emphasis on the Restatement (Second) of Conflicts,  which is now the predominant United States approach but is insufficiently covered in most other texts
• Author Laura Little brings her considerable expertise to the book—as a Professor of Law at Temple University School of Law, she specializes in federal courts, conflict of laws, and constitutional law and teaches, lectures, and consults internationally on these subjects. She is the author of numerous books and articles, including the successful Federal Courts: Examples & Explanations (Aspen), and Has received numerous awards for innovative and effective teaching
• Comprehensive Teachers Manual includes answers to every problem, teaching suggestions, sample syllabi, and a graphical depiction of each main case  as well as unique insights and case backgrounds

More information is available here. Extracts can be downloaded here.

The American Journal of International Law has issued a call for submissions for an agora on “Transnational Human Rights Litigation After Kiobel.” Here’s the call:

The American Journal of International Law is calling for short submissions (maximum 3000 words, including footnotes) for a forthcoming agora on “Transnational Human Rights Litigation After Kiobel.” Contributions must not have been previously published in whole or in substantial part (on the web or elsewhere). Some of the chosen contributions will be published in the October 2013 issue of the Journal. Other selected contributions may be published electronically in a special ASIL online publication. All contributions must be submitted no later than June 15 in order to be considered. Contributions on U.S. law issues, and on comparative and non-U.S. dimensions, are welcome. The editors aim to publish a set of distinctive contributions, rather than many making similar points. All selections for publication in AJIL or in the ASIL online publication will be peer reviewed by a committee of the AJIL editorial board consisting of Carlos Vázquez (chair), Curtis Bradley, and Ingrid Wuerth, in consultation with Co-Editors in Chief José Alvarez and Benedict Kingsbury. Decisions on publication (including requests for revisions) will be made on a rolling basis, but in any case no later than June 30. Submit contributions toajil@asil.org with “Kiobel Agora” in the subject line.

Stacie Strong (University of Missouri School of Law) has posted Discovery Under 28 U.S.C. §1782: Distinguishing International Commercial Arbitration and International Investment Arbitration on SSRN.

For many years, courts, commentators and counsel agreed that 28 U.S.C. §1782 – a somewhat extraordinary procedural device that allows U.S. courts to order discovery in the United States “for use in a proceeding in a foreign or international tribunal” – did not apply to disputes involving international arbitration. However, that presumption has come under challenge in recent years, particularly in the realm of investment arbitration, where the Chevron-Ecuador dispute has made Section 1782 requests a commonplace procedure. This Article takes a rigorous look at both the history and the future of Section 1782 in international arbitration, taking care to distinguish between requests made in the context of international commercial arbitration and requests made in the context of international investment arbitration. In so doing, the Article considers issues relating to grants of jurisdiction, state interests and standard interpretive canons.

The paper is forthcoming in the Stanford J. of Complex Litigation.

The second issue of French Journal du droit international (Clunet) for 2013 was just released. It contains articles addressing issues of public international law only. The table of contents is available here.

The Faculty of Law of the University of Urbino will host this summer its 55th Seminar of European Law.

Many of the courses taught over the two weeks of the seminar (19-31 August 2013) will deal with conflict issues. Although courses can be taught in English, this is a franco-italian seminar where courses are typically taught in French or Italian, with a translation in the other language.

Speakers are leading academics and practitioners, including Professors Bertrand Ancel, Tito Ballarino, Luigi Mari and Cyril Nourissat.

The full programme can be found here.

Professor Veerle Van Den Eeckhout , who teaches private international law at the Universities of Antwerp and of Leiden, has just published three new papers on SSRN.

The first one is entitled “The Instrumentalisation of Private International Law: Quo Vadis? Rethinking the “Neutrality” of Private International Law in an Era of Globalisation and Europeanisation of Private International Law”. The abstract reads as follows:

Private International Law is known as a very abstract, legal-technical and inaccessible discipline. Yet it is striking that PIL issues are conspicuously often interwoven with a number of heated, topical socio-legal debates, see for example 1) the debate on transnational corporate social responsibility, 2) the debate on posting of employees from Eastern to Western Europe, 3) the debate on residency and social-security entitlements of foreigners based on family relationships. Although at first glance the role of PIL in discussions about how these subjects should be regulated may seem rather modest, on further consideration it turns out to be crucial how the PIL questions that can be recognised are (or are not) identified and addressed. PIL is a “silent force”. If one looks closer, it is clear that PIL often even functions as a hinge between legal branches in these debates – e.g. between migration law and family law. But scholars – both PIL-lawyers and lawyers from other disciplines – have, so far, essentially left unexplored the PIL-issues of these debates.

Meanwhile, recent developments show that PIL is, occasionally, “instrumentalised” in a policy-related way, both by European and national authorities. There are, for example, tendencies on a Dutch national level to make PIL subservient to migration policy, ultimately transforming PIL into an instrument of restrictive migration policy. PIL could, thus, function as the “Achilles heel” of the legal protection of migrants. In several areas, there is pressure on PIL “from outside”. The question arises how the phenomenon of instrumentalisation of PIL – in its various forms – must be valued from the perspective of PIL: the PIL of European countries has of old been set up as a neutral reference system; the classical PIL paradigm implies that, independent of any legal political consideration or policy objective, the law applied to an international relationship is the law most closely connected to that legal relationship. Recognition of ongoing dynamical developments in the sense of instrumentalisation of PIL c.q. attempts to instrumentalise PIL thus raises a number of fundamental questions in respect of essential characteristics of PIL and the interaction of PIL with other branches of law: an analysis of the “instrumentalisation” of PIL requires a) research into the foundations of PIL b) as well as research into PIL’s “hinge-function”. Both where it concerns situations governed by European PIL rules and where it concerns situations that are not (yet) governed by European PIL rules, the question arises what position PIL should take in the forces at play and to what extent PIL can or should still adopt a “neutral” position. Could PIL be modelled, for example, into an instrument in the fight against international environment pollution, or into an instrument to guarantee labour protection?

In this project, all three above-mentioned debates will be analysed as “case-studies”. The project thus includes several broad and complex themes, all of them with major international relevance and national relevance for each of the EU-countries, in a context of globalisation, in order to make it possible to come to a general, over-all view: the overall ambition of the project is to arrive – through the thorough analysis of these cases and the exploration of future scenarios for each of them – at more synthetic insights on a) the essential characteristics of PIL itself and b) the characteristics of PIL in its hinge-function, in interaction with other disciplines. There is at present a very great need for a further and thorough study of each of the case studies as such, but as the case-studies have been well-selected, it will ultimately be possible to achieve a theoretical model and a typology.

 Click here  to download.

Two other, shorter papers entitled “The Role of Private International Law in Achieving Social Justice” and “New Possibilities for Argumentation in International Labour Law and Corporate Liability Coming Up?”, can be downloaded clicking here  and here.

It is my great pleasure to announce that the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for International, European and Regulatory Procedural Law has been officially inaugurated. The Opening Ceremony took place on Wednesday in Luxembourg in the presence of the Grand Duke Henri, the Luxembourgian Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, the Minister for Higher Education and Research of Luxembourg, the German Ambassador, the State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Germany, and the President of the Max Planck Society. The event was attended by more than 150 prominent persons from the ECJ, the Luxembourgian University and the academia of different countries. The following authorities addressed their Opening Remarks :

• Professor Peter Gruss, President of the Max Planck Society
• Ms Martine Hansen, Minister for Higher Education and Research, Luxembourg
• Ms Cornelia Quennet-Thielen, State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Germany
• Professor Rolf Tarrach, President of the University of Luxembourg
• Ms Viviane Reding, Vice-President of the European Commission and Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship (by means of a video message).

After these Welcome speeches, the Institute was presented by Professor Wolfgang Schön, Vice-President of the Max Planck Society, and by the Executive Director of the Institute, Professor Burkhard Hess.

The Opening Ceremony was preceded by an Opening Symposium on “Dispute Resolution and Law Enforcement in the Financial Crisis”, held on Tuesday with the participation of Professor Eddy Wymeersch (University of Ghent), Professor David Skeel (University of Pennsylvania), Professor Stefania Bariatti (University of Milan) and Professor Paolo Giudici (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano), as well as Professor Burkhard Hess (Executive Director of the Institute) and Professors Verica Trstenjak and Marco Ventoruzzo (External Scientific Members of the Institute).

The MPI Luxembourg has the ambition to promote research at the highest international standard. Its activity in this regard has already commenced and will go on with a carefully designed programme of lectures and seminars announced at the website of the Institute (www.mpi.lu). The  Library, noyau dur of the Institute already established in the fall of 2012 is already open to researchers from other academic institutions.

All the best to the new Institute.

Marie Elodie Ancel (Université Paris Est), Lea Marion and Laurence Wynaendts (Clifford Chance Paris) have posted Reflections on One-Sided Jurisdiction Clauses in International Litigation (About the Rothschild Decision, French Cour de Cassation, 26 September 2012) on SSRN. It is the English version of a paper published in a French law journal.

By criticising the “potestative nature” of one-sided jurisdiction clauses, the Rothschild decision may be construed as imposing on litigants perfect equality in their access to justice. This decision therefore threatens many of our jurisdiction clauses. In fact, if clauses that give one party unfettered discretion to choose where to sue have to be set aside, the other type of one-sided jurisdiction clauses, those that are simply dissociative, should be upheld as long as they do not substantially disadvantage one of the parties.

As many of you know, in 2011 several residents of Ecuador won a judgment in the courts of that country against Chevron Corporation for some $18 billion.  In 2012 the successful plaintiffs sued Chevron Corporation and Chevron Canada Ltd. in Ontario, seeking to have the Ecuadorian judgment enforced there.  The defendants brought a motion challenging the Ontario court’s jurisdiction to hear the action.  The Ontario Superior Court of Justice has now released its decision, siding with the defendants.  The decision has not yet been posted on CanLII but is available here.  The plaintiffs’ lawyer has publicly indicated that his clients will appeal.

Key aspects of the decision have been summarized by Roger Alford on the Opinio Juris website (here).