Views
How to Criticize U.S. Extraterritorial Jurisdiction (Part I)
Written by Bill Dodge, the John D. Ayer Chair in Business Law and Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law.
China has been critical of U.S. extraterritorial jurisdiction. In February, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a report entitled “The U.S. Willful Practice of Long-arm Jurisdiction and its Perils.” In the report, the Ministry complained about U.S. secondary sanctions, the discovery of evidence abroad, the Helms-Burton Act, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, and the use of extraterritorial jurisdiction in criminal cases. The report claimed that U.S. extraterritorial jurisdiction has caused “severe harm … to the international political and economic order and the international rule of law.”
There are better and worse ways to criticize U.S. extraterritorial jurisdiction. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs report pursues some of the worse ways and neglects some better ones. In this post, I discuss a few of the report’s shortcoming. In a second post, I discuss stronger arguments that one could make against U.S. extraterritorial jurisdiction. Read more
International child abduction: navigating between private international law and children’s rights law
In the summer of 2023 Tine Van Hof defended her PhD on this topic at the University of Antwerp. The thesis will be published by Hart Publishing in the Studies in Private International Law series (expected in 2025). She has provided this short summary of her research.
When a child is abducted by one of their parents, the courts dealing with a return application must consider several legal instruments. First, they must take into account private international law instruments, specifically, the Hague Child Abduction Convention (1980) and the Brussels IIb Regulation (2019/1111). Second, they have to take into account children’s rights law instruments, including mainly the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Choice of law in commercial contracts and regulatory competition: new steps to be made by the EU?
The recently published study titled ‘European Commercial Contract Law’, authored by Andrea Bertolini, addresses the theme of regulatory competition. It offers new policy recommendations to improve EU legal systems’ chances of being chosen as the law governing commercial contracts.
The Study’s main question
The European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs has published a new study authored by Andrea Bertolini, titled ‘European Commercial Contract Law’ (the ‘Study’). The Study formulates the main question as follows: ‘why the law chosen in commercial contracts is largely non-European and non-member state law’. The expression ‘non-European and non-member state’ law is specified as denoting the legal systems of England and Wales, the United States, and Singapore, and more generally, common law legal systems. The Study states:
It is easily observed how most often international contracts are governed by non-European law. The reasons why this occurs are up to debate and could be quite varied both in nature and relevance. Indeed, a recent study by Singapore Academy of Law (SAL) found that 43 per cent of commercial practitioners and in-house counsel preferred English law as the governing law of the contracts. Read more
News
Giustizia consensuale No 2/2024: Abstracts
The second issue of 2024 of Giustizia consensuale (published by Editoriale Scientifica) has just been released, and it features:
Tommaso dalla Massara (Professor at Università Roma Tre), Per un’ermeneutica della certezza nel processo civile romano: tra regula iuris e determinazione pecuniaria (For a Hermeneutics of Certainty in the Roman Civil Process: Between Regula Iuris and Pecuniary Determination; in Italian).
This contribution offers a reflection on procedural certainty, starting from the Roman classical process. In particular, crucial is the idea that, in this procedural system, certainty is to be related to the rule of ‘condemnatio pecuniaria’. Thus, certainty is translated into the determinacy of the pecuniary sentence. What emerges is a peculiar way of understanding judicial activity, which is characterised by the alternativeness between the groundedness and groundlessness of the claim (si paret/si non paret oriented to a certum), as opposed to the hypothesis in which the assessment is left entirely to the judge.
Beatrice Ficcarelli (Associate Professor at the University of Florence), L’acquisizione di informazioni e «prove» nella negoziazione assistita da avvocati: la tessera che mancava (The Acquisition of Information and ‘Evidence’ in Negotiation Assisted by Lawyers: The Missing Piece of the Puzzle; in Italian). Read more
Call for Participants: Quo Vadis Preferential Law Approach? A Survey on the Interpretation of Article 6(2) Rome I Regulation Across EU Member States
Benedikt Schmitz (University of Groningen) has shared the following call for participants with us:
Quo Vadis Preferential Law Approach? A Survey on the Interpretation of Article 6(2) Rome I Regulation Across EU Member States
Project description:
The Rome I Regulation plays a crucial role in determining the applicable law in cross-border consumer contracts within the European Union. Article 6(2) Rome I Regulation allows parties to choose the governing law while ensuring that consumers do not lose the protection granted by mandatory provisions of the law that would apply in the absence of such a choice. Despite its significance, the interpretation of this provision varies across Member States, leading to questions about its practical coherence and effectiveness. Read more
Call for Papers: Contributions on Regulatory Initiatives on Ecodesign and Sustainable Products to the Journal of Law, Market & Innovation (JMLI)
We are happy to share the following call for papers by the Journal of Law, Market & Innovation (JMLI):
The JLMI invites contributions on the subject of “Regulatory Initiatives on Ecodesign and Sustainable Products”, to explore the legal frameworks, challenges, and opportunities related to ecodesign, with the goal of fostering an in-depth understanding of how it can influence economic growth and how it will be integrated in the current legal framework. This Special Section invites scholarly contributions examining the role of emerging sustainability initiatives, introducing new sustainability requirements and responsibilities, particularly in the EU regulatory framework. Read more