Views
Adoption in the proposal for a European Parenthood Regulation
This post was written by Aukje Mens, Jurist at INEA, the Dutch expertise centre on intercountry adoption. She wrote in her own name.
Recently, an article I wrote about adoption in the proposal for a European Parenthood Regulation was published in the Dutch Journal of Family and Youth Law (Tijdschrift voor Familie- en Jeugdrecht, 2026/3). This article examines the uncertainties and gaps in the regulation of adoption and argues for an autonomous European Adoption Regulation to adequately govern international adoptions. Below is a summary in English of the article.
Copyright, Targeting and Geo-Blocking: The CJEU Stirs the Pot
By Graham Smith, Of Counsel, Bird & Bird LLP, London, UK
The CJEU’s recent copyright decision in Anne Frank endorses state of the art geo-blocking as an effective way of shielding a website from the different copyright laws of another EU Member State. Although the result on the facts is welcome, the potential implications of the Court’s underlying reasoning are less so. At a principled level, the judgment creates post-Brexit divergence with the UK courts’ targeting approach to cross-border online copyright infringement.
A Follow-Up: The German Judges Association’s Response to the HCCH Draft Text of a Future Convention on Parallel Proceedings and Related Actions
This post follows up on our earlier observations on the public consultation responses to the HCCH Draft Text of a future Convention on Parallel Proceedings and Related Actions. At the time our overview was prepared, the response of the German Judges Association was not yet available to us among the consultation materials on the HCCH website and could therefore not be included. It has since been made available, and we would like to take this opportunity to briefly add its key points to the discussion, notwithstanding that there are still coming up new responses such as the ones by Jonathan Mance (UK) – „Former Deputy President of UK Supreme Court, Co-Chair of the LC Advisory Committee”, the International Association of Consumer Law (IACL) or the Philippine Women Judges Association. We will leave it to others to comment on these.
News
Out Now: Calliess & Renner, Rome Regulations: Commentary (4th Edition)
【Out Now】Silberman’s Hague Academy General Course: The Counter-Revolution in U.S. Private International Law: From Standards to Rules?
For anyone who begins studying private international law – particularly from a civil law perspective – one of the first concepts encountered, after Savigny’s ‘Copernican Revolution’, is the American ‘Choice-of-Law Revolution’. Since the late 1950s, American courts and scholars have progressively abandoned the rigid territorial methodology embodied in the First Restatement of Conflict of Laws in favour of more flexible approaches based on standards and policy-oriented analyses. The pioneering contributions of Brainerd Currie, David Cavers, Robert Leflar, and William Baxter, among others, fundamentally reshaped American conflicts law and made the United States a laboratory of modern choice-of-law theory.
New Publication: Second Edition of the Elgar’s Research Handbook on EU PIL
While much of Europe slows down for August, there is still some fresh academic news to share: the publication of the second edition of the *Research Handbook on EU Private International Law*, edited by Youseph Farah, of the University of East Anglia and Elisabetta Bergamini, of the University of Udine, and published by Edward Elgar Publishing as part of the *Research Handbooks in European Law* series.
Thoroughly revised and updated, the new edition brings together civil-law and common-law perspectives to examine some of the most important questions and continuing challenges in EU private international law. Alongside the traditional fields of jurisdiction, contractual and non-contractual obligations, the Handbook addresses significant developments in family law, parental responsibility and cross-border succession.