Views
The Public Law-Private Law Divide and Access to Frozen Russian Assets
By Csongor István Nagy, Professor of Law at the University of Galway, Ireland, and at the University of Szeged, Hungary, and research professor at the HUN-REN Center for Social Sciences, Hungary.
The overwhelming majority of the international community condemned Russia’s war against Ukraine as a gross violation of international law and several countries introduced unilateral measures freezing Russian assets. It has been argued that countries should go beyond that and use these assets for the indemnification of Ukrainian war damages. Confiscation would, however, be unprecedented and raise serious international law concerns. While states have, with good reason, been reluctant to react to one wrongful act with another, this question has given rise to intensive debate. Recently, the EU authorized the use of net profits from the frozen assets but not the assets themselves to support Ukraine.
Tesseract: Don’t Over-React! The High Court of Australia, Proportionate Liability, Arbitration, and Private International Law
By Dr Benjamin Hayward
Associate Professor, Department of Business Law and Taxation, Monash Business School
X: @LawGuyPI, @MonashITICL
On 7 August 2024, the High Court of Australia handed down its long-awaited decision in Tesseract International Pty Ltd v Pascale Construction Pty Ltd [2024] HCA 24. The dispute arose out of a domestic commercial arbitration seated in South Australia, where the Commercial Arbitration Act 2011 (SA) is the relevant lex arbitri. That Act is a domestically focused adaptation of the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration (with its 2006 amendments).
The respondent to the arbitration sought to rely upon proportionate liability legislation found in the Law Reform (Contributory Negligence and Apportionment of Liability) Act 2001 (SA) and in the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth). The High Court was asked to determine whether those proportionate liability regimes could be applied in the arbitration. A very practical difficulty arose here, reflected in Steward J noting (in dissent) that the High Court was ‘faced with an invidious choice’: see [228]. Were the proportionate liability laws not to apply in the arbitration, the respondent might find themselves liable for 100% of the applicant’s loss, when they would not be liable to that same extent in court proceedings applying the same body of South Australian law. But were the proportionate liability laws to apply, the applicant might find themselves able to recover only a portion of their loss in the arbitration, and might then have to then pursue court proceedings against another third party wrongdoer to recover the rest: given that joinder is not possible in arbitration without consent. Read more
News
Book on The New Relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union
A book on The New Relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union was recently published. The book is edited by Dr. Emmanuel Guinchard (Liverpool John Moores University) and Prof. Carlo Panara (University of Leicester) and may be accessed here.
Overview
- Covers the whole spectrum of the new relationship between the UK and the EU
- Contains original discussion and evaluations of the impact of Brexit on UK sovereignty
- Includes both topics covered in the recent agreements and topics that have been left in a grey area
Commission Report and Staff Working Document on Brussels I recast
Today the European Commission published its eagerly awaited Commission Report on the application of the Brussels Ia Regulation (also referred to as Brussels I-bis), No 1215/2012 on jurisdiction and the recognition and enforcement of judgments in civil and commercial matters (recast). The Report is accompanied by a Staff Working Document, detailing a number of selected topics addressed in the Report. The documents rely in particular on the extensive Evaluation Study that was published in January 2023 as well as the findings of the JUDGTRUST project and the resulting book. Read more
Journal of Private International Law 20th Anniversary Conference – Programme and Registration
The 20th Anniversary Conference of the Journal of Private International Law will take place at the Faculty of Laws of University College London between 11 and 13 September 2025.A
The conference organizers, Ugljesa Grusic (UCL) and Alex Mills (UCL), and the editors of the Journal, Paul Beaumont (University of Stirling) and Jonathan Harris (King’s College London), are pleased to announce that the conference programme is now available on the conference website.
The conference will include, in the customary manner, a mixture of parallel panel sessions (on Thursday afternoon and Saturday morning) and plenary sessions (on Friday).
A limited number of non-speaker tickets and conference dinner tickets are available via the conference website, with early bird fees until 1 July 2025.