Throwback Thursday: Timberlane Lumber Co. v. Bank of America
Although the relevant text of the Sherman Act remained unchanged for most of the twentieth century, courts’ interpretations of its extraterritorial reach fluctuated dramatically. In 1909, the U.S. Supreme Court adopted a territorial approach in American Banana, described in a recent post, holding that the Sherman Act applied only to anticompetitive conduct in the United…
Continue ReadingComparing Extraterritoriality in the EU
How a court decides whether a statute applies extraterritorially is a fundamental question in transnational litigation. TLB has lots of information about the U.S. approach. Our Primer on Extraterritoriality describes the federal and state approaches, as well as the customary international law rules on jurisdiction to prescribe. Recent posts have discussed the extraterritorial application of…
Continue ReadingUsing TLB to Teach International Business Transactions
This post continues our series explaining how professors can use resources on TLB to teach various classes. Previous posts have discussed Transnational Litigation and Civil Procedure. This post discusses International Business Transactions (IBT). Although TLB focuses on litigation and IBT focuses on transactions, there is a great deal of overlap. The most obvious examples are…
Continue ReadingThrowback Thursday: American Banana and the Presumption Against Extraterritoriality
Today, it is “well established” that U.S. antitrust law applies extraterritorially to foreign conduct that causes substantial effects in the United States, but this was not always true. When the Supreme Court first addressed the geographic scope of the Sherman Act in 1909, it held that the act applied only to conduct in the United…
Continue ReadingThrowback Thursday: International Association of Machinists v. OPEC
In 1978, the International Association of Machinists (IAM), a labor union, sued OPEC and its member countries for violating U.S. antitrust law by operating a cartel. The district court held that OPEC countries were immune from suit under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA). On appeal the Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court’s dismissal on…
Continue ReadingSecond Circuit Rejects Act of State Doctrine in Antitrust Case
In a recent decision, Celestin v. Caribbean Air Mail, Inc., the Second Circuit held that the act of state doctrine does not bar U.S. antitrust claims based on the acts of a foreign government. Although the Second Circuit is right, its decision diverges from the decisions of other circuits that have applied the doctrine as…
Continue ReadingThrowback Thursday: Ralf Michaels on Empagran’s Empire
Ralf Michaels’ brief book chapter on F. Hoffman-La Roche Ltd. v. Empagran S.A. fundamentally changed my understanding of that case—as well as my understanding of the Supreme Court’s recent approach to transnational cases more generally. Empagran seems like a sleeper of a case, a short opinion about yet another transnational antitrust class action. But from…
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