Choice of Law in the American Courts in 2022
The thirty-sixth annual survey on choice of law in the American courts is now available on SSRN. The survey covers significant cases decided in 2022 on choice of law, party autonomy, extraterritoriality, international human rights, foreign sovereign immunity, foreign official immunity, the act of state doctrine, adjudicative jurisdiction, and the recognition and enforcement of foreign…
Continue ReadingNew Paper on Bias in Choice of Law
Dan Klerman has a new paper, Bias in Choice of Law: New Empirical and Experimental Evidence, that seeks to determine the extent to which U.S. courts exhibit bias when applying modern choice-of-law rules. The paper draws upon a dataset of choice-of-law cases involving automobile accidents decided between 1963 and 2018 and relies on regression analysis…
Continue ReadingSinger on Personal Jurisdiction Law and Choice-of-Law Doctrine
Professor Joseph Singer has a terrific new article that is well worth reading. In Hobbes & Hanging: Personal Jurisdiction v. Choice of Law, published in the Arizona Law Review, he writes about the contradictions between personal jurisdiction law and choice-of-law doctrine in the United States. He argues that personal jurisdiction law is one-sided and unbalanced…
Continue ReadingTransnational Litigation Anticipation: Previewing the Court’s Next Term
TLB recently recapped the Supreme Court’s transnational litigation cases from last Term. This post looks ahead to the upcoming Term, for which the Court has already granted certiorari in a personal jurisdiction case that may have implications for transnational litigation. TLB is also tracking several interesting petitions for certiorari in disputes involving the Foreign Sovereign…
Continue ReadingA Baffling Characterization Decision
Characterization plays an important role in a court’s choice-of-law analysis. If an issue is characterized as a “contracts” issue, then the court will apply the choice-of-law rule for contracts to determine the governing law. If an issue is characterized as a “torts” issue, then the court will apply the choice-of-law rule for torts. Because the…
Continue ReadingWho Owns the Ferrari F50?
The Ferrari F50 is, by all accounts, a pretty amazing car. One website describes it as the “ultimate showcase of the infamous Italian marque” and “one of the most sought-after driving machines in the world.” Only 349 were ever made. Just last year, a Ferrari F50 sold at auction for roughly $3.8 million. All of…
Continue ReadingWhen Should Federal Common Law Govern Transnational Litigation?
The conventional wisdom is that transnational litigation “can trigger foreign relations concerns.” Because the federal government has primary responsibility for the United States’ relations with other nations, the question naturally arises whether federal law should govern such litigation even when neither a federal statute, nor the U.S. Constitution, nor a treaty is applicable. Currently, as…
Continue ReadingA Primer on State Law in Transnational Litigation
The procedural and substantive rules that U.S. courts apply in transnational litigation come from many sources, including the U.S. Constitution, international treaties, customary international law, federal statutes, federal rules, and federal common law (both preemptive and non-preemptive)—but also, state statutes, state rules, and state common law. This primer focuses on the underappreciated role of state…
Continue ReadingSide-Stepping the Dismal Swamp: A Reply to Roosevelt
In a recent post, we sought to call attention to what we see as two issues with the way the draft Restatement (Third) of Conflict of Laws embraces a specific theory of choice of law called the “two-step” approach. First, we suggested that there is a disconnect between the “two-step” approach and the Restatement’s black…
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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