Views
Insights and Future Directions of PIL Based on the 2024 Online Summer Courses at The Hague Academy of International Law
By Birgit van Houtert, Assistant Professor of Private International Law at Maastricht University
From 29 July till 16 Augustus 2024, the Summer Courses on Private International Law (PIL) were held at the 93rd session of the summer courses of the Hague Academy of International Law. The PIL courses were followed by 250 onsite attendees and remotely 61 attendees from 74 different countries. The inaugural lecture was presented by Lord Lawrence Collins of Mapesbury (Former Justice at the United Kingdom Supreme Court) on the “Use and Abuse of Comity in International Litigation”. In the next three weeks, the general course was given by Charalambos Pamboukis (Professor at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens) titled “The Metamorphoses of Private International Law”. During these three weeks, six special courses were given by Alessandra Zanobetti (Professor at the University of Bologna) on “The Effects of Economic Sanctions and Counter-Measures on Private Legal Relationships”; Natalie Y. Morris-Sharma (Director at the Attorney-General’s Chambers of Singapore) on “The Singapore Convention and the International Law of Mediation”; Carlos Esplugues Mota (Professor at the University of Valencia) on “New Dimensions in the Application of Foreign Law by Courts (and Arbitrators) and Non-judicial Authorities”; Jack Coe (Professor at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law) on “Non-ICSID Convention Investor-State Awards in Domestic Courts”; Eva Lein (Professor at the University of Lausanne) on “Breathing Space in International Commercial Litigation”; Andrew Dickinson (Professor at the University of Oxford) on “Natural Justice in Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgements”. These PIL experts provided very interesting and valuable insights, including future (desirable) directions on PIL that can guide and inspire students, researchers, legal practitioners, courts, and legislators. The courses will be published by Brill in the series Collected Courses of The Hague Academy of International Law / Recueil des cours de l’Académie de La Haye. The fact that the courses commonly focused on PIL globally, by including national, regional and international PIL, is particularly laudable in view of our interconnected world. This blog aims to describe common threads of the 2024 Online Summer Courses on PIL that may encourage you to read the Hague Academy Collected Courses and inspire further research.[1]
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
The Procedural Law Unit at the University of Nicosia’s 5th Annual Symposium and JIWP 2025 Conference: “Judicial Independence and Liberal Democracy Under Threat: The Challenge of Implementing the ELI Mt Scopus Standards on Judicial Independence”
A symposium on “Judicial Independence and Liberal Democracy Under Threat: The Challenge of Implementing the ELI Mt Scopus Standards on Judicial Independence” will take place from 10 to 12 December 2025 at the University of Nicosia. The event is organised by the Procedural Law Unit in cooperation with the International Association of Judicial Independence and World Peace (JIWP) and will be held at the UNESCO Amphitheatre.
Registration Open – Book Launch: The Hague Convention on Choice of Court Agreements: A Commentary
Registration is open for the book launch celebrating the publication of The Hague Convention on Choice of Court Agreements: A Commentary, to be held in hybrid format in The Hague on 11 December 2025 from 1.30 p.m. to 4.45 p.m. (CET). The book launch will coincide with the tenth anniversary of the entry into force of the 2005 Choice of Court Convention.
The book launch will consist of two session. In the first session, the authors and discussants will explore selected chapters of the book. Brooke Marshall (University of Oxford) and Stephanie Francq (Catholic University of Louvain) will discuss the manifest injustice and public policy exception in Article 6 of the Convention; Louise Ellen Teitz (Roger Williams University) and Fausto Pocar (University of Milan) will discuss declarations under Articles 21 and 22 and accommodating multiple legal systems; and Gilles Cuniberti (University of Luxembourg, EAPIL) and Adrian Briggs KC (University of Oxford) will discuss the law applicable to the issue of consent to choice of court agreements. The second session of the event will discuss the practical operation of the Convention and the practical application of the text, with the participation of Delphia Lim (Ministry of Law of Singapore), Colin Seouw (Colin Seouw Chambers LLC), and Anselmo Reyes (Singapore International Commercial Court). Dr Christophe Bernasconi (HCCH) will provide opening remarks, and Melissa Ford and Dr Ning Zhao (HCCH) will moderate the discussions.
For more information, and to register, please visit: https://www.hcch.net/en/instruments/conventions/specialised-sections/choice-of-court/hcch-book-launch
This post is published by the Permanent Bureau of the Hague Conference of Private International Law (HCCH).
Fourth Issue of the Lloyd’s Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly for 2025
The fourth issue of the Lloyd’s Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly for 2025 has recently been published. It contains the following articles, cases notes and book review.
Michael Howard, “The True History of the Origin of the Mareva Injunction or Freezing Order”
Fifty years ago, in 1975, a revolutionary innovation occurred in English procedural law, the introduction of what is officially named the freezing injunction, formerly and to some extent even now known as the Mareva injunction. It was the consequence of two decisions of the Commercial Court, the Karageorgis and Mareva cases. The thesis of this article, lightly camouflaged, is that these cases and this change were brought about by a combination of four factors which are present in most such developments of the common law: the personal, the institutional, the technical legal and the accidental. It is an attempt to present all of them and to show that the first and particularly the last were disproportionately large contributors.
Masood Ahmed, “State Immunity and the New York Convention”
Adrian Briggs, “Book Review of Hong Kong Private International Law” (by Wilson Lui and Anselmo Reyes)
My views
I read the interesting—but in my view unconvincing—critical review by Emeritus Professor Adrian Briggs of “Private International Law in Hong Kong” (by Wilson Lui and Anselmo Reyes). My reading of the review is that Briggs laments the authors’ limited engagement with English sources, suggesting that because Hong Kong’s private international law is not as fully developed as Singapore’s, English texts and cases should operate as gap-fillers.
I take a different view. I am pleased to see Asian private international law scholars asserting a more autonomous and context-sensitive approach to developing their conflict-of-laws rules. That intellectual independence is healthy for the discipline, and it is precisely the direction I believe African private international law should pursue.