Two New Supreme Court Decisions on the Presumption Against Extraterritoriality
The end of the Supreme Court’s term brought two decisions on the presumption against extraterritoriality, a significant and contested interpretive canon for federal statutes. Yegiazaryan v. Smagin ruled 6-3 that a civil RICO suit based on an alleged scheme to fraudulently conceal assets belonging to a U.S. judgment debtor had sufficient domestic content to fit…
Continue ReadingExtraterritorial Application of Federal Securities Law After Morrison
In Morrison v. National Australia Bank (2010), the U.S. Supreme Court applied the presumption against extraterritoriality to the principal antifraud provision of the Securities Exchange Act, section 10(b). It held that section 10(b) applies “only [to] transactions in securities listed on domestic exchanges, and domestic transactions in other securities.” As I have explained elsewhere, Morrison…
Continue ReadingThe Case for Attracting Litigation Business to the United States
U.S. state and federal courts routinely and reliably enforce “inbound” forum selection clauses (FSCs)—that is, if a party sues in a U.S. court designated by a contractual forum selection clause, courts will hear the case rather than dismissing on the basis of forum non conveniens. In a recent post, John Coyle urged federal actors to…
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 ReadingExtraterritorial Jurisdiction and Conflict of Laws
In a forthcoming Article, I take the Supreme Court’s recent jurisprudence on the presumption against extraterritoriality and view it through the lens of conflict of laws. In so doing, I attempt to show how the presumption mirrors features of conflicts doctrine and makes some of the same mistakes conflict law already has made. This list…
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