International Comity

Smagin‘s Surprises

Last week’s decision in Yegiazaryan v. Smagin was surprising in a number of respects, from the line-up of the Justices to the possible shift it signals in the presumption against extraterritoriality.

Continue Reading

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…

Continue Reading

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…

Continue Reading

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…

Continue Reading

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…

Continue Reading

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…

Continue Reading

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…

Continue Reading

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…

Continue Reading

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…

Continue Reading

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…

Continue Reading

Ingrid (Wuerth) Brunk

Vanderbilt Law School
ingrid.wuerth@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

Zachary D. Clopton

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

Robert Kry

MoloLamken LLP
Bio | Posts

Luana Matoso

Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law
Bio | Posts

Curtis A. Bradley

University of Chicago Law School
Bio | Posts

Pamela K. Bookman

Fordham University School of Law
Bio | Posts

Matthew Salavitch

Fordham Law School
Bio | Posts

Hannah Buxbaum

Indiana University Maurer School of Law
Bio | Posts

Paul B. Stephan

University of Virginia School of Law
Bio | Posts

Noah Buyon

Duke University School of Law
Bio | Posts

Naman Karl-Thomas Habtom

University of Cambridge
Bio | Posts

Ben Köhler

Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law
Bio | Posts