Views
U.S. Supreme Court Renders Personal Jurisdiction Decision
This post is by Maggie Gardner, a professor of law at Cornell Law School. It is cross-posted at Transnational Litigation Blog.
The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday upheld the constitutionality of Pennsylvania’s corporate registration statute, even though it requires out-of-state corporations registering to do business within the state to consent to all-purpose (general) personal jurisdiction. The result in Mallory v. Norfolk Southern Railway Co. re-opens the door to suing foreign companies in U.S. courts over disputes that arise in other countries. It may also have significant repercussions for personal jurisdiction doctrine more broadly. Read more
The New Saudi Civil Transaction Act and its Potential Impact on Private International Law in Saudi Arabia
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has recently enacted a new Civil Transactions Law (Royal Decree No. M/199, dated June 16, 2023). The law will enter into force on December 16, 2023, 180 days after its enactment (hereinafter referred to as “the new law”). This law has been rightly described as “groundbreaking” because, prior to the enactment of the new law, there has been no codification of civil law in the Kingdom, and civil law issues have traditionally been governed by the classical rules of Islamic Sharia according to the teachings of the prevailing school of fiqh (religio-legal jurisprudence) in the Kingdom (Hanbali School). Like most of the civil law codifications in the region, the new law focuses mainly on the so-called “patrimonial law,” i.e., property rights and obligations (contractual and non-contractual). Family relations and successions are dealt with in a separate law, which was previously enacted in 2022 and entered into force the same year (Personal Status Act, Royal Decree No. M/73 of 9 March 2022, entered into force on June 18, 2022).
Book Review: The UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights
This book review was written by Begüm Kilimcioglu, PhD researcher, Research Groups Law & Development and Personal Rights & Property Rights, University of Antwerp
Barnali Choudbury, The UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights- A Commentary, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023
The endorsement of the United Nations Guiding Principles (UNGPs) in 2011 represents a milestone for business and human rights as the principles successfully achieved to put the duties of different actors involved in (possible) human rights abuses on the international agenda. The UNGPs provide a non-binding yet authoritative framework for a three-pillared scheme to identify and contextualize the responsibilities with regard to business and human rights: the State’s responsibility to protect, businesses’ responsibility to respect, and facilitating access to remedy. However, although the impact of the principles can be described as ground-breaking, they have also been criticized for their vague and generic language which provides for a leeway for certain actors to circumvent their responsibilities (see Andreas Rasche & Sandra Waddock, Surya Deva, Florian Wettstein).Therefore, it is important to determine and clarify the content of the principles to increase their efficiency and effectiveness. In this light, this commentary on the UNGPs which examines all the principles one-by-one through the inputs of various prominent scholars, academics, experts and practitioners is indeed a reference guide to when working on corporate social responsibility.
News
CfP: Enforcement of Rights in the Digital Space (7/8 Nov 24, Osnabrück)
On 7 and 8 November, the European Legal Studies Institute (ELSI) at the University of Osnabrück, Germany, is hosting a conference on “Enforcement of Rights in the Digital Space”.
The organizers have kindly shared the following Call for Papers with us:
The European Legal Studies Institute (ELSI) is pleased to announce a Call for Papers for a conference at Osnabrück University on November 7th and 8th, 2024.
We invite submissions on the topic of »Enforcement of Rights in the Digital Space« and in particular on the interplay between the current EU acts on the digital space and national law. The deadline for submissions is May 15th, 2024.
Legal Acts regulating the digital space in the European Union, such as the GDPR, the Data Act and the Digital Services Act, establish manifold new rights and obligations, such as a duty to inform about data use and storage, rights of access to data or requests for interoperability. Yet, with regard to many of these rights and obligations it remains unclear whether and how private actors can enforce them. Often, it is debatable whether their enforcement is left to the member states and whether administrative means of enforcement are intended to complement or exclude private law remedies. The substantial overlap in the scope of these legal acts, which often apply simultaneously in one and the same situation, aggravates the problem that the different legal acts lack a coherent and comprehensive system for their enforcement.
The conference seeks to address the commonalities, gaps and inconsistencies within the present system of enforcement of rights in the digital space, and to explore the different approaches academics throughout Europe take on these issues.
Speakers are invited to either give a short presentation on their current work (15 minutes) or present a paper (30 minutes). Each will be followed by a discussion. In case the speakers choose to publish the paper subsequently, we would kindly ask them to indicate that the paper has been presented at the conference. We welcome submissions both from established scholars and from PhD students, postdocs and junior faculty.
All speakers are invited to a conference dinner which will take place on November 7th, 2024. Further, the European Legal Studies Institute will cover reasonable travel expenses.
Electronic submissions with an abstract in English of no more than 300 words can be submitted to [elsi@uos.de]. Please remove all references to the author(s) in the paper and include in the text of the email a cover note listing your name and the title of your paper. Any questions about the submission procedure should be directed to Mary-Rose McGuire [mmcguire@uos.de]. We will notify applicants as soon as practical after the deadline whether their papers have been selected.
Reminder: Conference on Informed Consent to Dispute Resolution Agreements, Bremen, 20–21 June 2024
We have kindly been informed that a limited number of places remains available at the conference on Informed Consent to Dispute Resolution Agreements on 20 and 21 June in Bremen, which we advertised a couple of weeks ago.
The full schedule can be found on this flyer, which has meanwhile been released.
First View Article on ICLQ
A first view article was published online on 12 April 2024 in International and Comparative Law Quarterly.
Raphael Ren, “The Dichotomy between Jurisdiction and Admissibility in International Arbitration”
The dichotomy between jurisdiction and admissibility developed in public international law has drawn much attention from arbitrators and judges in recent years. Inspired by Paulsson’s ‘tribunal versus claim’ lodestar, attempts have been made to transpose the distinction from public international law to investment treaty arbitration, yielding a mixed reception from tribunals. Remarkably, a second leap of transposition has found firmer footing in commercial arbitration, culminating in the prevailing view of the common law courts in England, Singapore and Hong Kong that arbitral decisions on admissibility are non-reviewable. However, this double transposition from international law to commercial arbitration is misguided. First, admissibility is a concept peculiar to international law and not embodied in domestic arbitral statutes. Second, its importation into commercial arbitration risks undermining the fundamental notion of jurisdiction grounded upon the consent of parties. Third, the duality of ‘night and day’ postulated by Paulsson to distinguish between reviewable and non-reviewable arbitral rulings is best reserved to represent the basic dichotomy between jurisdiction and merits.