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Conference Programme: Commercial Issues in Private International Law, Sydney
Last year we posted about an upcoming conference at the University of Sydney Law School on Commercial Issues in Private International Law. The programme for the conference, which will take place on 16 February 2018, is now available here.
Professor Andrew Dickinson, University of Oxford, and Professor TM Yeo, Singapore Management University, will give the keynote addresses.
Conference registration can be carried out via this link.
New Article: Conflict of Laws and Relational Feminism
Readers of this blog might be interested in Roxana Banu, “A Relational Feminist Approach to Conflict of Laws” (2017) 24 Mich. J. Gender & L. 1. It can be accessed through SSRN at this location.
The specific context is transnational surrogacy arrangements, but much of the article goes beyond that to other areas of the field more generally. The article engages with work by several other scholars who write about theories or philosophies of private international law.
The Abstract is below.
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Feminist writers have long engaged in critiques of private law. Surrogacy contracts or the “reasonable man” standard in torts, for example, have long been the subjects of thorough feminist analysis and critique. When private law issues touch on more than one jurisdiction, Conflict of Laws is the doctrine that determines which jurisdiction can try the case and—as separate questions—which jurisdiction’s law should apply and under what conditions a foreign judgment can be recognized and enforced. Yet, there are virtually no feminist perspectives on Conflict of Laws (also known as Private International Law). This is still more surprising when one considers that feminist approaches to Public International Law have been developing for over a quarter century.
In this Article, I show that there is a fundamental need to rethink the image of the transnational individual in Conflict of Laws theory and methodology. It is here, I argue, that feminism—specifically relational, often known as cultural, feminism—has an important contribution to make to Conflict of Laws. I develop a relational feminist approach to Conflict of Laws and apply it to a pressing contemporary issue, namely transnational surrogacy arrangements.
Overall, this Article shows how relational feminism can illuminate the problems of adopting an atomistic image of the individual in a transnational context, as well as provide an outline for an alternative—a relational theory of the self that redefines autonomy and the law, creating an important shift in how Conflict of Laws perceives its regulatory dimensions. The Article connects three of relational feminism’s core insights—the notion of relational autonomy, the focus on relationships, and relational theories of judging—to Conflict of Laws theory and methodology.
The Implementation of the New Insolvency Regulation. Improving Cooperation and Mutual Trust
Following the entry into force of the new Insolvency Regulation across the European Union in June 2017, the MPI Luxembourg has released a book guiding practitioners and national lawmakers through the implementation of the new rules. The title corresponds to volume 10 of the Studies of the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for International, European 
and Regulatory Procedural Law collection (320 pp., ISBN 978-3-8487-4448-0).
The book is the result of a 2-year research project, co-funded by the European Commission under the Specific Programme “Civil Justice” and co-led by the MPI Luxembourg together with the Universities of Vienna and Milano. The project aimed to evaluate the changes that were brought to the European Insolvency Regulation in order to keep pace with the substantial developments in domestic law.
Beyond providing an overview of these changes and expected problems that lay ahead, the book puts forth a series of guidelines and recommendations to facilitate the application and interpretation of the new Regulation. It covers the three primary advancements of the Regulation:
(1) pre-insolvency proceedings that discourage liquidation in favour of rescue and restructuring;
(2) procedural instruments which facilitate the administration of complex cross-border insolvencies and, thus, reduce the opening of inefficient parallel insolvency proceedings via the strengthening of procedural cooperation;
(3) a procedural mechanism designed to reinforce coordination of corporate group insolvencies.
The book bridges the gap between academia and practice. Judges and practitioners, including representatives of the German Ministry of Justice, were invited to actively contribute to the discussions and enhanced the academic dialogue. Some of their inputs are published as well in the Annex to the book.
The table of contents can be found here.