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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
Call for Papers: “Tariffs: Emerging challenges in global trade” by the Journal of Law, Market & Innovation (JMLI)
The Journal of Law, Market & Innovation (JLMI) welcomes submissions for its first issue of 2026.
The Call for Papers for this second issue is devoted to Tariffs: Emerging challenges in global trade.
You can find the call with all the details at this link.
Prospective articles should be submitted in the form of an abstract (around 800 words) or draft articles to submissions.jlmi@iuse.it within 10 July 2025. The publication of the issue is set for the end of March, 2026.
For further information, or for consultation on a potential submission, you can contact us by email at editors.jlmi@iuse.it.
Seminar: Child marriage: root causes and questions of recognition, 5 June
At the occasion on 5 June of the PhD Defence of Leontine Bruijnen on How can Private International Law bridge the Gap between the Recognition of Unknown Family Relations such as Kafala and Child Marriage for Family Law and Migration Law Purposes? , we are organising an expert seminar at the University of Antwerp and online:
Child marriage: root causes and questions of recognition:
11.00: Welcome and introduction by Thalia Kruger, University of Antwerp
11.10: The Role of Customs and Traditions in Addressing Child Marriages in Tanzania: A Human Rights-Based Approach, by Esther Kayamba, Mzumbe University and University of Antwerp
11.25: The link between climate change and child marriage in Tanzania, by Agripina Mbilinyi, Mzumbe University and University of Antwerp
11.40: Socio-cultural factors that Sustain Child Marriage at Quarit Wereda, Amhara Region, Ethiopia by Yitaktu Tibetu, Human Rights Lawyer, Senior Gender Adviser and councillor psychologist
12.00: Perspective from Europe by Bettina Heiderhoff, University of Münster and Trui Daem, PhD researcher Ghent University
12.20: Debate and Q&A
12.50: End
To register, please contact Thalia Kruger
Second Issue of Lloyd’s Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly for 2025
The second issue of LMCLQ was recently published.
It contains the following conflict of laws works,
David Foxton, “The Applicable Law of an Arbitration Agreement: Floating or on the Rocks?”
Marcus Teo and Kah-Wai Tan, “Territoriality over Universalism”
Adrian Briggs, “Submission to a Russian Court”