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…
Continue ReadingSupreme 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…
Continue ReadingHappy Holidays
TLB is taking a break for the holidays. We will return to blogging on Tuesday, January 3.
Continue ReadingTLB’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…
Continue ReadingThrowback 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…
Continue ReadingOral 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,…
Continue ReadingNew 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…
Continue ReadingThe 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…
Continue ReadingDistrict Court Dismisses Killing Claims Against MBS
Yesterday, the District Court for the District of Columbia (Judge John Bates) dismissed a lawsuit brought by Democracy in the Arab World Now (DAWN) and the widow of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was brutally murdered by security agents at the Saudi embassy in Istanbul. The plaintiffs sued Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) and…
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