International Comity

Discovery and Immunity: LIV v. PGA

Photo by Edwin Compton on Unsplash

The U.S. legal battle between the PGA Tour (Tour) and the upstart rival LIV Golf continues to revolve around discovery. As regular TLB readers know, LIV Golf is a new professional golf tour that competes with the PGA, in part by luring PGA players to play in LIV tournaments. LIV is financed by the Public Investment…

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Rejecting Comity-Based Abstention in Human Rights Cases

Defendants in transnational human rights cases may seek dismissal on a great many bases—so many, in fact, that it can be hard to keep them all straight. One growing source of confusion is the argument that a case should be dismissed based on “comity.” The problem is that comity isn’t a single doctrine. But because…

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Another Court Rejects Chinese Data Privacy Law as a Bar to U.S. Discovery

A second U.S. decision has held that China’s Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) did not bar a U.S. discovery request because of an exception in the law for statutory obligations. As previously reported on TLB, a federal court in California held last year that the PIPL’s exception for transfers “necessary to fulfill statutory duties and responsibilities or…

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Throwback Thursday: Blackmun’s Prescient Dissent in Aérospatiale

In Société Nationale Industrielle Aérospatiale v. U.S. District Court (1987), the Supreme Court held that U.S. courts need not treat the procedures set forth in the Hague Evidence Convention as the exclusive or even the primary means for managing discovery of evidence located abroad. Four justices dissented in part in a remarkably prescient opinion authored…

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A Primer on International Comity

The Supreme Court in Hilton v. Guyot (1895) famously defined international comity as “the recognition which one nation allows within its territory to the legislative, executive or judicial acts of another nation.” That definition is incomplete, however, as comity encompasses much more than the recognition of foreign acts. The Restatement (Fourth) of Foreign Relations Law…

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Throwback 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…

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How Do Federal Courts Treat Foreign Parallel Litigation?

The Supreme Court has not explained how federal judges should evaluate parallel litigation in foreign courts. If the same parties are litigating the same issues before a foreign tribunal, should the federal court stay its hand? Or should it proceed until one or the other of the cases results in a judgment? The traditional European…

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Throwback Thursday: Joseph Story and the Comity of Nations

One of the most influential books on transnational litigation was written nearly two centuries ago by a sitting Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Joseph Story’s Commentaries on the Conflict of Laws, first published in 1834, synthesized foreign and domestic cases regarding conflict of laws and the enforcement of foreign judgments. Story endorsed international comity…

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Throwback Thursday: Mason v. The Blaireau

Admiralty has always been a site of transnational litigation in the United States. From the earliest years of the Republic, the admiralty courts heard disputes brought by foreigners against foreigners over incidents that occurred outside the United States—cases that today might be derided as “foreign-cubed.” These “foreign-cubed” admiralty decisions are worth a fresh look because…

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Cert Petition Challenges Second Circuit’s Comity Abstention Doctrine

A cert petition filed with the Supreme Court on March 21, 2022 challenges the doctrine of prescriptive comity abstention.  The Second Circuit used this doctrine to reverse a $147 million antitrust judgment against Chinese companies for fixing the price of vitamin C sold into the United States. The Second Circuit’s decision relies on the kind…

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Ingrid (Wuerth) Brunk

Vanderbilt Law School
ingrid.wuerth@vanderbilt.eduEmail

William Dodge

UC Davis School of Law
wsdodge@ucdavis.eduEmail

Maggie Gardner

Cornell Law School
mgardner@cornell.eduEmail

John F. Coyle

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

Zachary D. Clopton

Northwestern Pritzker School of Law
zclopton@law.northwestern.eduEmail

David L. Sloss

Santa Clara University School of Law
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John Parry

Lewis & Clark Law School
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Mark B. Feldman

Georgetown University Law Center
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Lawrence Collins

University College London
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Dmitriy Bogorodskiy

Pepperdine University
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Pamela K. Bookman

Fordham University School of Law
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Azadeh Mizani

Shahid Beheshti University
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Matt Hornung

Cornell Law School
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