Scholarship

Now or Then? The Temporal Aspects of Choice-of-Law Clauses

Several years ago, I published a paper that examined how U.S. courts interpret choice-of-law clauses. That paper contains a detailed discussion of the most common interpretive issues—whether the clause selects the tort laws of the chosen jurisdiction in addition to its contract laws, for example—that arise in litigation. There was, however, one important omission. The…

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Reflections on the New Edition of International Civil Litigation in United States Courts

Over twenty years ago, a horrible accident occurred at the ski resort of Kaprun, Austria.  At that time, I was a young attorney working at a European law firm.  The firm’s partners read about new lawsuits, filed in the United States, that threatened to bring all the procedural tools of the United States judicial system…

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Surveying Extraterritoriality

TLB advisor Hannah Buxbaum has posted to SSRN a  piece entitled “The Practice(s) of Extraterritoriality.” It is an introductory chapter from the book Extraterritoriality/L’extraterritorialité, edited by Buxbaum and Thibaut Fleury Graff, which grew out of the 2019 Centre for Studies and Research at the Hague Academy of International Law. Buxbaum’s chapter is a masterful survey of extraterritoriality…

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Is the Treaty Supremacy Rule Really Dead?

In Medellín v. Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a non-self-executing treaty does not supersede conflicting state law, or perhaps that courts cannot enforce non-self-executing treaties to override conflicting state laws. After Medellín, one would have expected state courts in treaty supremacy cases to begin their analyses by determining whether a treaty is self-executing….

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The Political Question Doctrine in the Lower Courts

Curt Bradley and Eric Posner have posted to SSRN a fascinating new paper about the political question doctrine. In The Real Political Question Doctrine, they take an empirical look at cases applying the doctrine in the lower federal courts since the Supreme Court’s 1962 decision in Baker v. Carr. Among other things, they find that…

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Has the Alien Tort Statute Made a Difference?

In a globalized and interconnected world, human rights litigation has, by necessity, become transnational. For decades, the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) was viewed as a beacon of American justice for foreign victims of human rights violations. However, a series of Supreme Court decisions—most recently the paired cases of Nestlé USA, Inc. v. Doe and Cargill,…

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New Scholarship on the Argentinian Sovereign Debt Litigation

For more than a decade in the early 00s, Argentina’s $100 billion sovereign debt default dominated the transnational litigation news headlines – and, indeed, global financial news. Hundreds of cases were filed against Argentina in U.S. courts with long-term implications for foreign sovereign immunity and foreign direct investment.   Many of those cases were consolidated before…

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Enforcing Chinese Judgments

It has become routine for courts in the United States to recognize and enforce Chinese judgments, subject to the same limits that are applied to judgments from other countries. Last year, a New York court threatened to upset this positive trend. Relying on U.S. State Department Country Reports noting corruption and lack of judicial independence…

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Foreign Defendants and the Future of Personal Jurisdiction

The Supreme Court recently granted certiorari in yet another personal jurisdiction case (the eighth such case in just over ten years). Mallory v. Norfolk Southern Rwy. Co. has no transnational facts, but it is highly relevant for the future of transnational litigation in U.S. courts. Corporate registration statutes, like the one being challenged in Mallory,…

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Recent Scholarship on Political Economy and the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act

Professor Maryam Jamshidi (@MsJamshidi) just published an article highlighting the relationship between capitalism and the law of foreign sovereign immunity, especially in the United States.  The article includes a detailed and rich account of current developments under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA). It comes as no surprise that the United States (and other global actors)…

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Ingrid (Wuerth) Brunk

Vanderbilt Law School
ingrid.brunk@vanderbilt.eduEmail

William Dodge

George Washington University Law School
william.dodge@law.gwu.eduEmail

Maggie Gardner

Cornell Law School
mgardner@cornell.eduEmail

John F. Coyle

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

Hannah Buxbaum

UC Davis School of Law
hbuxbaum@ucdavis.eduEmail

Mehrunnisa Chaudhry

George Washington University Law School
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Victoria Pino

Vanderbilt Law School
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Robert Kry

MoloLamken LLP
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Rinat Gareev

Whitecliff Management
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León Castellanos-Jankiewicz

Institute for International and European Law
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Paul B. Stephan

University of Virginia School of Law
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