Scholarship

Substituted Service and the Hague Service Convention

Can state law be used to avoid a federal treaty, even though the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution makes treaties supreme over state law? The somewhat surprising answer is yes—at least when it comes to the Hague Service Convention and state rules on substituted service. The Hague Service Convention governs transnational service of process…

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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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Recent Scholarship on Antisuit Injunctions

Giuseppe Colangelo and Valerio Torti have posted an interesting paper on antisuit injunctions in patent litigation. The paper helpfully surveys recent clusters of litigation in China, Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States and elsewhere. Especially notable is the growth both in antisuit injunctions against Chinese companies and in antisuit injunctions issued by Chinese courts…

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Customary International Law’s Domestic Status: Reflections After Twenty-Five Years

We are grateful to Bill Dodge for highlighting our 1997 article on the domestic legal status of customary international law.  In that article, we critically analyzed what we referred to as the “modern position,” which is the claim made by some academics and the Restatement (Third) of Foreign Relations Law that customary international law has…

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Throwback Thursday: Revisiting Bradley and Goldsmith’s “Critique of the Modern Position”

Twenty-five years ago, Professors Curtis Bradley and Jack Goldsmith shook the fields of transnational litigation, federal courts, and foreign relations law by questioning the conventional wisdom that customary international law has the status of federal common law. Their article Customary International Law as Federal Common Law: A Critique of the Modern Position, published in the…

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Whytock Challenges the Conventional Wisdom that Transnational Forum Shopping Is Increasing in U.S. Courts

In a recent article, Professor Chris Whytock challenges the claim that transnational forum shopping by foreign plaintiffs is increasing. Using data on approximately 8 million civil actions filed in federal court, Whytock shows that transnational diversity cases represent a small and decreasing percentage of overall litigation.

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Foreign Dictators in U.S. Courts

Statues of dictators

From Augusto Pinochet to Jiang Zemin and Ferdinand Marcos, foreign dictators have for decades faced a range of claims in U.S. courts. But there is also a line of cases in U.S. courts involving dictators as plaintiffs. Over the last decade, authoritarian governments from China, Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela have used the U.S. judicial system to file frivolous claims against political opponents. And these claims appear to be mainly a harassment technique against dissidents and media outlets based in the United States.

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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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