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New rules for extra-territorial jurisdiction in Western Australia
The rules regarding service outside the jurisdiction are about to change for the Supreme Court of Western Australia.
In a March notice to practitioners, the Chief Justice informed the profession that the Supreme Court Amendment Rules 2024 (WA) (Amendment Rules) were published on the WA legislation website on 26 March 2024.
The Amendment Rules amend the Rules of the Supreme Court 1971 (WA) (RSC). The primary change is the replacement of the current RSC Order 10 (Service outside the jurisdiction) while amending other relevant rules, including some within Order 11 (Service of foreign process) and Order 11A (Service under the Hague Convention).
The combined effect of the changes is to align the Court’s approach to that which has been applicable in the other State Supreme Courts for some years.
The changes will take effect on 9 April 2024. Read more
International tech litigation reaches the next level: collective actions against TikTok and Google
Written by Xandra Kramer (Erasmus University Rotterdam/Utrecht University) & Eduardo Silva de Freitas (Erasmus University Rotterdam), members of the Vici project Affordable Access to Justice, financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), www.euciviljustice.eu.
Introduction
We have reported on the Dutch WAMCA procedure for collective actions in a number of previous blogposts. This collective action procedure was introduced on 1 January 2020, enabling claims for damages, and has since resulted in a stream of (interim) judgments addressing different aspects in the preliminary stages of the procedure. This includes questions on the admissibility and funding requirements, some of which are also of importance as examples for the rolling out of the Representative Action Directive for consumers in other Member States. It also poses very interesting questions of private international law, as in particular the collective actions for damages against tech giants are usually international cases. We refer in particular to earlier blogposts on international jurisdiction in the privacy case against TikTok and the referral to the CJEU regarding international jurisdiction under the Brussels I-bis Regulation in the competition case against Apple.
Turning Point: China First Recognizes Japanese Bankruptcy Decision
This post is written by Guodong Du and Meng Yu and published at China Justice Observer. It is reproduced here by kind permission of the authors.
Key takeaways:
- In September 2023, the Shanghai Third Intermediate People’s Court ruled to recognize the Tokyo District Court’s decision to commence civil rehabilitation proceedings and the order appointing the supervisor ((2021) Hu 03 Xie Wai Ren No.1).
- This marks not only the first time that China has recognized a Japanese court’s decision in a bankruptcy procedure, but also the first time that China has recognized a Japanese judgment.
- The case establishes a legal precedent for cross-border bankruptcy decisions, demonstrating that prior non-recognition patterns between China and Japan in civil and commercial judgments may not apply in such cross-border scenarios.
- While not resolving the broader recognition challenges between the two nations, this acknowledgment sends a positive signal from the Chinese court, hinting at potential future breakthroughs and fostering hope for improved legal cooperation.
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New Canadian Conflicts Text
The Irwin Law “Essentials Series” is a collection of texts about Canadian law aimed at a broad audience: it includes law students and also lawyers, judges and academics. It has been quite successful over the past twenty years. In 2024 Irwin Law was acquired by University of Toronto Press. It has continued the Essentials Series and the use of the Irwin Law imprint.
It has now published the third edition of Conflict of Laws written by Professor Stephen G.A. Pitel of Western University, Canada. The second edition was published in 2016 and so this edition updates almost a decade of activity, mainly from courts across Canada. The major change is that the chapter on declining jurisdiction has been reorganized and updated in light of the Supreme Court of Canada’s decisions in Douez v Facebook, Inc (2017) and Haaretz.com v Goldhar (2018). All chapters have been updated to reflect new decisions, legislative changes and recent scholarship.
More information is available here. For those outside Canada, the book is a clear and accessible source of comparative conflict of laws analysis.
English and EU Perspectives on Hague 2019: Hybrid Seminar at UCL Laws
Ugljesa Grusic (UCL) has kindly shared the following invitation with us.
On 24 March 2025, at 6pm UK time, Marta Pertegás (Maastricht University; University of Antwerp; a fulltime member of the Permanent Bureau of the Hague Conference on Private International Law between 2008 and 2017) and Alex Mills (UCL; a Specialist Editor of Dicey, Morris and Collins on the Conflict of Laws, with particular responsibility for, inter alia, the rules on the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments) will give a seminar on The 2019 Hague Judgments Convention – English and EU Perspectives at the Faculty of Laws, University College London. The event will be delivered in a hybrid format and the readers of the blog are welcome to join either in person or on line.
The seminar is part of the International Law Association (British Branch) Lecture Series and will be chaired by Ugljesa Grusic.
On 1 July 2025, the 2019 Hague Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgments in Civil or Commercial Matters will enter into force in England and Wales. This historic regime establishes a general treaty basis for the recognition and enforcement of civil judgments between Convention States, supplementing the existing national rules and the Hague Choice of Court Convention 2005. Perhaps most significantly, it will provide common rules for the recognition and enforcement of judgments from England and Wales in EU Member States, and conversely, for EU Member State judgments to be recognised and enforced in England and Wales, to some extent filling a ‘gap’ created by Brexit.
This seminar will address the significance of this development from both an English and EU perspective, examining the main features of the 2019 Convention and considering the opportunities and challenges it presents.
To register, please follow this link.
U.S. District Court’s Order in the Venezuelan Deportees Case Was Not Extraterritorial
The following post was kindly provided by Hannah Buxbaum, Vice President for International Affairs, Professor of Law and John E. Schiller Chair, Indiana University, and is cross-posted on tlblog.org
As was widely reported yesterday, the Trump administration permitted two planes carrying Venezuelan deportees to continue on their way to El Salvador after receiving a judicial order to turn the flights back to the United States. A story in Axios quotes an administration official who explains that they were not in fact “actively defying” the judge—the order just came too late, since the planes were already out of U.S. airspace. This seems to be an extraterritoriality argument, suggesting that the judge lacks authority to order an action to take place outside U.S. borders.
The administration has this completely wrong. The judge is ordering the administration to take action inside the United States—that is, to instruct the planes to turn around. That instruction will in turn cause something to happen elsewhere (the pilots will change course), but that doesn’t make the order impermissibly extraterritorial. This is exactly the same the basis on which courts in garden-variety civil disputes order parties subject to their jurisdiction to procure evidence or turn over assets that are located abroad. Moreover, since the planes were reportedly over international waters at the time the order was entered, compliance would not have required any actions by a foreign actor or within the territory of another state—in other words, it wouldn’t have created a conflict of laws.
Now that the deportees are already in El Salvador, that picture is more complicated, since local authorities there might refuse to take action. Even the existence of such a conflict, though, doesn’t mean that Judge Boasberg’s order exceeds his authority. It remains to be seen whether any of the other justifications the White House offered up for ignoring that order are any more compelling, but the argument that it didn’t apply once the planes had left the United States is certainly not.
For further leading expert input on extraterritoriality see one of our previous posts here.