Scholarship

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

Natalie Reid

Debevoise & Plimpton LLP
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Beatrice Walton

Debevoise & Plimpton LLP
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Rinat Gareev

Whitecliff Management
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Harold Hongju Koh

Yale Law School
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Rachel Brewster

Duke Law School
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Marketa Trimble

William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
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