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Explaining the Hague Judgments Convention to U.S. Lawyers

On March 2, 2022, the United States signed the Hague Judgments Convention, a multilateral agreement that seeks to facilitate the recognition and enforcement of judgments across national borders. While there is a vast difference between signing and ratification – as anyone who has followed the halting progress of the Hague Convention on Choice-of-Court Agreements can…

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MBS’s Immunity and the Subject Matter Jurisdiction Problem

As previously discussed at TLB, a federal district court recently dismissed claims against Mohammad bin Salman (MBS) arising from the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. When the claims were filed, MBS was merely Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and not entitled to head-of-state immunity. MBS was subsequently appointed Prime Minister, however, a position that does…

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Supreme Court to Revisit Extraterritorial Scope of Trademark Law

On March 1, the Supreme Court will hear argument in Abitron Austria GmbH v. Hetronic International, Inc., which concerns the extraterritorial scope of the Lanham (Trademark) Act. In resolving this case, the Court will need to decide what to do about an old precedent that appears to be inconsistent with the Court’s modern approach to…

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Happy Holidays

TLB is taking a break for the holidays. We will return to blogging on Tuesday, January 3.

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TLB’s Top Ten Posts in 2022

As 2022 draws to a close, so too does the first year for TLB. We began blogging in late March. Since then, we have published nearly two hundred posts by more than fifty authors. Here are TLB’s top ten posts, by number of views, in 2022. (1) Maggie Gardner, U.S. Courts Gut Key Provision of…

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Throwback Thursday: Blackmun’s Prescient Dissent in Aérospatiale

In Société Nationale Industrielle Aérospatiale v. U.S. District Court (1987), the Supreme Court held that U.S. courts need not treat the procedures set forth in the Hague Evidence Convention as the exclusive or even the primary means for managing discovery of evidence located abroad. Four justices dissented in part in a remarkably prescient opinion authored…

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It Pays to Know About… Obscure Statutes Invalidating Forum Selection Clauses

The law of forum selection clauses can be complicated.  There are, however, some issues that are relatively straightforward.  When a state legislature enacts a statute announcing that an outbound forum selection clause (one selecting the courts of a different jurisdiction) is void when written into a particular type of contract, the clause is generally not…

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Oral Argument in Doe v. Apple

Last week, the D.C. Circuit heard oral argument in Doe v. Apple, a case brought by victims of forced labor and human trafficking against five U.S. technology companies. The plaintiffs are children or family members of children who were injured or killed mining cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The defendants—Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft,…

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New Paper on Bias in Choice of Law

Dan Klerman has a new paper, Bias in Choice of Law: New Empirical and Experimental Evidence, that seeks to determine the extent to which U.S. courts exhibit bias when applying modern choice-of-law rules. The paper draws upon a dataset of choice-of-law cases involving automobile accidents decided between 1963 and 2018 and relies on regression analysis…

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The Fate of the Afghan Central Bank Assets – State of Play

Afghanistan is experiencing a humanitarian and economic crisis following the Taliban’s return to power in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal of forces in August 2021. As previously covered on TLB (and on Lawfare), the U.S. government has frozen roughly $7 billion in assets held by Afghanistan’s central bank, Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB), that were…

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Ingrid (Wuerth) Brunk

Vanderbilt Law School
ingrid.wuerth@vanderbilt.eduEmail

William Dodge

George Washington University Law School
william.dodge@law.gwu.eduEmail

Maggie Gardner

Cornell Law School
mgardner@cornell.eduEmail

John F. Coyle

University of North Carolina School of Law
jfcoyle@email.unc.eduEmail

León Castellanos-Jankiewicz

Institute for International and European Law
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Paul B. Stephan

University of Virginia School of Law
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Robin Effron

Brooklyn Law School
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Maryam Jamshidi

University of Colorado Law School
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Fikri Soral

Galatasaray University
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Gregg Cashmark

Vanderbilt Law School
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Hannah Buxbaum

Indiana University Maurer School of Law
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Symeon Symeonides

Willamette University College of Law
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Aaron D. Simowitz

Willamette University College of Law
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John B. Bellinger

Arnold & Porter LLP
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R. Reeves Anderson

Arnold & Porter LLP
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Volodymyr Ponomarov

Arnold & Porter LLP
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