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Brazil’s New Law on Forum Selection Clauses: Throwing the Baby out with the Bathwater?
This post was written by Luana Matoso, a PhD candidate and research associate at Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg, Germany.
Brazil has changed its law on international forum selection clauses. In June this year, a new statutory provision came into force, adding, unexpectedly, new requirements for their enforceability. In this attempt to redistribute domestic litigation, the Brazilian legislator may well have thrown out the baby, international forum selection clauses, with the bathwater.
Improving the settlement of (international) commercial disputes in Germany
This post was written by Prof. Dr. Giesela Rühl, LL.M. (Berkeley), Humboldt University of Berlin, and is also available via the EAPIL blog.
As reported earlier on this blog, Germany has been discussing for years how the framework conditions for the settlement of (international) commercial disputes can be improved. Triggered by increasing competition from international commercial arbitration as well as the creation of international commercial courts in other countries (as well as Brexit) these discussions have recently yielded a first success: Shortly before the German government coalition collapsed on November 6, the federal legislature adopted the Law on the Strengthening of Germany as a Place to Settle (Commercial) Disputes (Justizstandort-Stärkungsgesetz of 7 October 2024)[1]. The Law will enter into force on 1 April 2025 and amend both the Courts Constitution Act (Gerichtsverfassungsgesetz – GVG) and the Code of Civil Procedure (Zivilprozessodnung – ZPO)[2] with the aim of improving the position of Germany’s courts vis-à-vis recognized litigation and arbitration venues – notably London, Amsterdam, Paris and Singapore. Specifically, the new Law brings three innovations. Read more
New Zealand Court of Appeal allows appeal against anti-enforcement injunction
Introduction
The New Zealand Court of Appeal has allowed an appeal against a permanent anti-suit and anti-enforcement injunction in relation to a default judgment from Kentucky, which the plaintiff alleged had been obtained by fraud: Wikeley v Kea Investments Ltd [2024] NZCA 609. The Court upheld the findings of fraud. It also did not rule out the possibility of an injunction being an appropriate remedy in the future. However, the Court concluded that an injunction could only be granted as a step of last resort, which required the plaintiff to pursue its right of appeal against the Kentucky judgment.
The background to the case is set out in a previous post on this blog (see also here). In summary, the case involved allegations of “a massive worldwide fraud” perpetrated by the defendants — a New Zealand company (Wikeley Family Trustee Ltd), an Australian resident with a long business history in New Zealand (Mr Kenneth Wikeley), and a New Zealand citizen (Mr Eric Watson) — against the plaintiff, Kea Investments Ltd (Kea), a British Virgin Islands company owned by a New Zealand businessman. Kea alleged that the US default judgment obtained by WFTL was based on fabricated claims intended to defraud Kea. Kea claimed tortious conspiracy and sought a world-wide anti-enforcement injunction, which was granted by the High Court, first on an interim and then on a permanent basis. Wikeley, the sole director and shareholder of WFTL, appealed to the Court of Appeal.
The Court of Appeal allowed the appeal against the grant of the injunction. At the same time, it upheld the High Court’s declarations that the Kentucky default judgment was obtained by fraud and that it was not entitled to recognition or enforcement in New Zealand. It also upheld the High Court’s damages award (for legal costs incurred in overseas proceedings in defence of the tortious conspiracy). Read more
News
Revue Critique de droit international privé – issue 2025/1
Written by Hadrien Pauchard (assistant researcher and doctoral student at Sciences Po Law School)
The first issue of the Revue Critique de droit international privé of 2025 has just been released. It gathers six contributions honouring Albert Armin Ehrenzweig and his legacy, as well as seven case notes and numerous book reviews.
The doctrinal part of the volume is devoted to the proceedings of the Albert Armin Ehrenzweig Conference organized in June 2024 at the University of Vienna, fifty years after the passing away of the great author. The contributions commemorate both the man and the scientist, testifying to the relevance of Albert A. Ehrenzweig’s scholarship to contemporary private international law. They are published in French in the printed version of the Revue (also available online here), and will be available shortly in English (here).
Out Now: Dickinson, Natural Justice in Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgments, Recueil des cours, Tome 446
Last summer, Andrew Dickinson (Professor of the Conflict of Laws, University of Oxford, and former editor of ConflictofLaws.net) delivered a special course at the summer course of the Hague Academy of International Law entitled ‘Natural Justice in Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgments’. It has now been published as Volume 446 of the Recueil des cours / Collected Courses.
The blurb reads as follows:
This special course assesses the utility of ideas of ‘natural law’ and ‘natural justice’ as tools to explain, rationalise and develop the rules governing the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments currently applied by the world’s legal orders.
After introducing the topic, the first part of the course consider how influential 17th and 18th century accounts of the law of nature sought to account for the relations existing between all human beings, as well as the creation of political societies with law-making powers, the global ordering of those societies and the role of adjudication as a means of resolving disputes within and among them. This provides the historical and intellectual background for what follows.
The principal part of the course considers how writers on the conflict of laws in this period drew upon and utilised these ideas, as the rules that we apply today to regulate foreign judgments began to take shape. This leads to a study of the further evolution of the legal landscape in the 19th century, highlighting the use of natural law reasoning by judges and commentators to explain and justify the effectiveness of individual exercises of adjudicatory authority beyond their original domains, as well as the later rejection of natural law thinking in favour of models centred on ideas of sovereignty and territoriality, which continue to dominate today.
Having completed this historical survey, the course examines the specific legacy of natural law reasoning in the common law world, involving the use of principles of ‘natural justice’ to deny recognition of unjust foreign judgments, as well as the counterparts of these principles in other legal systems and international treaties.
Drawing on the preceding material, the concluding chapter considers the case for renaturalising the law in this area, and the implications of following this path.
More information on the book can be found here.
It is available to subscribers to the Recueil des cours here.
AMEDIP: Annual seminar to take place from 22 to 24 October 2025 (in Spanish)
The Mexican Academy of Private International and Comparative Law (AMEDIP) will be holding its XLVIII Seminar entitled “Reflections regarding the Inter-American system in the 50th Anniversary of the CIDIP-I and the latest developments of Private International Law in Mexico” (Reflexiones en torno al sistema interamericano en el 50 Aniversario de la CIDIP-I y la actualidad del Derecho Internacional Privado en México) from 22 to 24 October 2025. The venue of the seminar will be the Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro (Querétaro, Mexico). Read more