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The impact of Brexit on the operation of the EU legislative measures in the field of private international law
On 28 February 2018, the European Commission published the draft Withdrawal Agreement between the EU and the UK, based on the Joint Report from the negotiators of the two parties on the progress achieved during the first phase of the Brexit negotiations.
The draft includes a Title VI which specifically relates to judicial cooperation in civil matters. The four provisions in this Title are concerned with the fate of the legislative measures enacted by the EU in this area (and binding on the UK) once the “transition of period” will be over (that is, on 31 December 2020, as stated in Article 121 of the draft).
Article 62 of the draft provides that, in the UK, the Rome I Regulation on the law applicable to contracts and the Rome II Regulation on the law applicable to non-contractual obligations will apply, respectively, “in respect of contracts concluded before the end of the transition period” and “in respect of events giving rise to damage which occurred before the end of the transition period”.
Article 63 concerns the EU measures which lay down rules on jurisdiction and the recognition and enforcement of decisions. These include the Brussels I bis Regulation on civil and commercial matters (as “extended” to Denmark under the 2005 Agreement between the EC and Denmark: the reference to Article 61 in Article 65(2), rather than Article 63, is apparently a clerical error), the Brussels II bis Regulation on matrimonial matters and matters of parental responsibility, and Regulation No 4/2009 on maintenance.
According to Article 63(1) of the draft, the rules on jurisdiction in the above measures will apply, in the UK, “in respect of legal proceedings instituted before the end of the transition period”. However, under Article 63(2), in the UK, “as well as in the Member States in situations involving the United Kingdom”, Article 25 of the Brussels I bis Regulation and Article 4 of the Maintenance Regulation, which concern choice-of-court agreements, will “apply in respect of the assessment of the legal force of agreements of jurisdiction or choice of court agreements concluded before the end of the transition period”(no elements are provided in the draft to clarify the notion of “involvement”, which also occurs in other provisions).
As regards recognition and enforcement, Article 63(3) provides that, in the UK and “in the Member States in situations involving the United Kingdom”, the measures above will apply to judgments given before the end of the transition period. The same applies to authentic instruments formally drawn up or registered, and to court settlements approved or concluded, prior to the end of such period.
Article 63 also addresses, with the necessary variations, the issues surrounding, among others, the fate of European enforcement orders issued under Regulation No 805/2004, insolvency proceedings opened pursuant to the Recast Insolvency Regulation, European payment orders issued under Regulation No 1896/2006, judgments resulting from European Small Claims Procedures under Regulation No 861/2007 and measures of protection for which recognition is sought under Regulation No 606/2013.
Article 64 of the draft lays down provisions in respect of the cross-border service of judicial and extra-judicial documents under Regulation No 1393/2007 (again, as extended to Denmark), the taking of evidence according to Regulation No 1206/2001, and cooperation between Member States’ authorities within the European Judicial Network in Civil and Commercial Matters established under Decision 2001/470.
Other legislative measures, such as Directive 2003/8 on legal aid, are the object of further provisions in Article 65 of the draft.
The domino effect of international commercial courts in Europe – Who’s next?
Written by Georgia Antonopoulou and Erlis Themeli, Erasmus University Rotterdam (PhD candidate and postdoc researchers ERC project Building EU Civil Justice)
On February 7, 2018 the French Minister of Justice inaugurated the International Commercial Chamber within the Paris Court of Appeals following up on a 2017 report of the Legal High Committee for Financial Markets of Paris (Haut Comité Juridique de la Place Financière de Paris HCJP, see here). As the name suggests, this newly established division will handle disputes arising from international commercial contracts (see here). Looking backwards, the creation of the International Commercial Chamber does not come as a surprise. It offers litigants the option to lodge an appeal against decisions of the International Chamber of the Paris Commercial Court (see previous post) before a specialized division and thus complements this court on a second instance. Read more
Court of Appeal of Ljubljana and implied consent to application of Slovenian law by not- contesting the application of Slovenian law in first and in appellate instance
Written by Dr. Jorg Sladic, Attorney in Ljubljana and Assistant Professor in Maribor (Slovenia)
In judgment of 25 October 2017 in case I Cpg 1084/2016 (ECLI:SI:VSLJ:2017:I.CPG.1084.2016) published on 31 January 2018 the Slovenian Appellate Court ruled on a question of implied consent to application of Slovenian law. Read more
News
Out Now: Interim Measures in Cross-Border Civil and Commercial Disputes
A new volume by Deyan Draguiev on Interim Measures in Cross-Border Civil and Commercial Disputes, based on his PhD thesis supervised by Peter Mankowski, has just been published with Springer.
The blurb reads as follows:
The book focusses on applying a holistic overview of interim measures and associated procedures in the context of cross-border private law (civil and commercial) disputes that are the subject of international litigation and arbitration proceedings. It reexamines key features of said problem and outlines novel findings on interim relief in the area of international dispute resolution. The book analyses the rules of EU law (EU law regulations such as the Regulation Brussels Ibis and the rest of the Brussels regime) as the single system of cross-border jurisdictional rules, as well as the rules of international arbitration (both commercial and investment). In the process, it conducts a complete mapping of interim measures problems and explores the criteria for granting relief under national laws. For this purpose, it includes an extensive comparative law overview of many jurisdictions in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, etc., to reveal common standards for granting interim relief.
Interim relief is a salient problem in dispute resolution, and serious international disputes usually require requests for such measures. This makes a more complete understanding all the more important. For scholars and practitioners alike, there are various ways to seek relief; precisely this complexity calls for a more complex and multilayered analysis, which does not (as is usually the case) adopt the perspective of either litigation or arbitration, but instead weighs the pros and cons and considers the viability and reliability of the different options, viewed from all angles.
Law Matters—Less Than We Thought, by Holger Spamann & Daniel M. Klerman
Holger Spamann and Daniel Klerman recently conducted a most interesting experiment on judicial behavior in the context of conflict of laws, the results of which have been pre-published by the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization. They have kindly provided the following summary for the readers of this blog (who may access the full paper here):
Modern American choice of law has been much criticized for giving judges too much discretion. In particular, Brilmayer and others predict that the use of open-ended standards, such as the Restatement Second’s “most significant relationship” test, will enable judges to decide disputes in biased ways, including a bias in favor of plaintiffs. In contrast, critics argue that the more rules-based approach – such as the lex loci delicti principle that prevailed in America before the 1960s and that, in large part, continues to apply in much of the world – would be more predictable and less subject to bias. We designed an experiment involving US federal judges to test whether the modern American, standards-based approach is, in fact, less predictable and more subject to bias. We find that the rules-based approach may constrain more than the modern standards-based approach, although even under seemingly clear rules judicial decisions were less predictable than we expected. Judges under neither the lex loci rule nor that “most significant relationship” standard exhibited a bias towards the more sympathetic party, although we did detect some pro-plaintiff bias under both the rule and the standard. Somewhat surprisingly, we also found that judges who were supposed to apply the modern “most significant relationship” standard tended to decide according to lex loci delicti rule.
Save the Date! Talk on BRICS Private International Law on 18 July 2023
On 18 July 2023, The Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, Hamburg, will host a ‘Talk’ on ‘The Role of Private International Law in the Adjudication of Cross-Border Civil and Commercial Disputes in BRICS: Some Reciprocal Lessons’ from 11 AM – 12.30 PM (CEST) as a part of their ‘Conflict Club’ which is scheduled every Tuesday. The talk will be delivered virtually by Professor Saloni Khanderia, who, as many may know, is the co-author of the leading commentary on Indian Private International Law that was published in 2021 by Hart/Bloomsbury Publications.