Further Thoughts on Personal Jurisdiction for Helms-Burton Act Claims
Last week, Bill Dodge reported on the Eleventh Circuit’s recent decision in Rodriguez v. Imperial Brands, PLC, in which the court dismissed Helms-Burton Act claims against two British defendants for lack of personal jurisdiction. Bill critiqued the court’s application of Fuld v. Palestine Liberation Organization (2025), but not the decision’s ultimate outcome. The difficulty with…
Continue ReadingFourth Circuit Affirms Extraterritorial Injunction in IP Dispute
The Fourth Circuit (Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III) recently affirmed an extraterritorial preliminary injunction in a cross-border intellectual property dispute. In dmarcian Inc. v. DMARC Advisor BV, the court engaged in distinct extraterritorial analyses of federal trademark law, federal trade secret law, and state tortious interference claims. It is a particularly well-written opinion worth reading…
Continue ReadingFourth Circuit Answers Civ Pro Hypothetical
Civil procedure professors love to gin up tricky hypotheticals to quiz 1Ls on the limits of diversity jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1332(a). The Fourth Circuit recently confronted a real-world scenario involving a dual-citizen LLC and the distinction between § 1332(a)(2) and § 1332(a)(3). In a decision destined to be cited in casebooks, the Fourth…
Continue ReadingSeventh Circuit Limits Email Service on Foreign Defendants
Last Friday, the Seventh Circuit held in Kangol LLC v. Hangzhou Chuanyue Silk Import & Export Co., Ltd. that defendants located in China cannot be served by email when the Hague Service Convention applies. (Disclaimer: Bill Dodge and I filed an amicus in Kangol with the help of friend-of-the-blog Ted Folkman urging this result.) The…
Continue ReadingThe Good and the Bad of King v. Bon Charge
The Supreme Court’s latest personal jurisdiction decision, Fuld v. Palestine Liberation Organization (2025), left the lower courts to work out what exactly the Fifth Amendment due process analysis entails. The emerging consensus is that those questions can be avoided as long as the facts of a case meet the preexisting test for personal jurisdiction under…
Continue ReadingSupreme Court decides Enbridge and Fluor
Last Tuesday, the Supreme Court decided two cases that TLB has been following: Enbridge Energy, LP v. Nessel and Hencely v. Fluor Corp. Enbridge Enbridge is a dispute about whether Michigan can effectively shut down a pipeline under the Straits of Mackinac, but the particular question before the Court was purely procedural: does equitable tolling…
Continue ReadingMaryland Shuts Down Climate-Change Litigation
Last month, the Supreme Court of Maryland affirmed dismissal of all claims in lawsuits brought by Baltimore, Annapolis, and Anne Arundel County against 26 oil and gas companies alleging that the companies actively deceived the public about the reality and dangers of climate change. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2021 before being…
Continue ReadingHappy Birthday to TLB!
On March 28, 2022, Transnational Litigation Blog went live. Our very first post, titled Why Transnational Litigation?, listed the many reasons why we thought the world needed a blog devoted to the topic of transnational litigation. While it is unlikely that this post will ever achieve a status akin to the very first sketch on…
Continue ReadingSDNY Approves Email Service for Temporary Measures and Contempt
The Second Circuit’s recent decision in Smart Study Co., Ltd. v. Shenzhenshixindajixieyouxiangongsi made clear that defendants located in Hague Service Convention member states that have objected to service by postal channels typically cannot be served by email. Last month, Judge Rakoff of the Southern District of New York addressed an important limit to Smart Study’s…
Continue ReadingArgument Preview: Enbridge Energy, LP v. Nessel
The Supreme Court will hear oral argument this morning in Enbridge Energy, LP v. Nessel, a case involving Michigan’s effort to end an easement across the Straits of Mackinac for an oil and natural gas pipeline between the Midwest and Canada. As Bill has covered previously for TLB, this is one in a series of…
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