Expropriation

Litigating Expropriation Claims in U.S. Courts

Foreign sovereigns generally enjoy sovereign immunity in the United States by operation of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA). The FSIA specifically provides, however, that a foreign sovereign shall not be immune in any case in which “rights in property taken in violation of international law are in issue.” On its face, this expropriation exception…

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New Scholarship on the FSIA

Vivian Grosswald Curran (University of Pittsburgh) has a draft article up on SSRN entitled Nazi Stolen Art: Uses and Misuses of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.  Many important FSIA cases have involved great works of art stolen by the Nazis including the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in Altmann v. Republic of Austria concerning the ownership…

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More Evidence that Helms-Burton is Backfiring

In 1996, Congress passed the Helms-Burton Act to strengthen sanctions against Cuba and to deter foreign companies from investing there. To discourage foreign investment, Title III created a civil remedy allowing U.S. nationals to sue any person who “traffics” in property confiscated by the Cuban government for damages in an amount three times the value…

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Using 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…

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New Article Argues that the Helms-Burton Act Has Backfired

In an article recently posted on SSRN, Gergana Sivrieva surveys cases filed under Title III of the Helms-Burton Act for trafficking in expropriated property. She shows that, surprisingly, the principal defendants have not been foreign companies investing in Cuba but rather U.S. companies with only attenuated connections to such property. Congress passed the Helm-Burton Act…

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Supreme Court decides Cassirer v. Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation

The Supreme Court today unanimously held in Cassirer v. Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation that state choice-of-law rules apply in cases brought against foreign sovereigns alleging non-federal claims.

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D.C. Circuit Addresses FSIA in Hungarian Art Case

Last month, the D.C. Circuit addressed several important questions under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) in its latest decision in De Csepel v. Republic of Hungary, a long-running suit to recover art expropriated during the Second World War. The court held that the defendant Hungarian National Asset Management Inc. (MNV) was subject to jurisdiction…

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Ingrid (Wuerth) Brunk

Vanderbilt Law School
ingrid.wuerth@vanderbilt.eduEmail

William Dodge

UC Davis School of Law
wsdodge@ucdavis.eduEmail

Maggie Gardner

Cornell Law School
mgardner@cornell.eduEmail

John F. Coyle

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

Zachary D. Clopton

Northwestern Pritzker School of Law
zclopton@law.northwestern.eduEmail

David L. Sloss

Santa Clara University School of Law
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John Parry

Lewis & Clark Law School
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Mark B. Feldman

Georgetown University Law Center
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Lawrence Collins

University College London
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Dmitriy Bogorodskiy

Pepperdine University
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Pamela K. Bookman

Fordham University School of Law
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Azadeh Mizani

Shahid Beheshti University
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Matt Hornung

Cornell Law School
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