William Dodge
George Washington University Law School
William S. Dodge (@ProfBillDodge) is Lobingier Professor of Comparative Law and Jurisprudence at the George Washington University Law School. He served as Counselor on International Law to the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State from 2011 to 2012 and as Co-Reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement (Fourth) of Foreign Relations Law from 2012 to 2018. He is currently a Reporter for the second phase of the Restatement (Fourth), an Adviser for the Restatement (Third) of Conflict of Laws, and a member of the Department of State’s Advisory Committee on International Law. Professor Dodge is the co-author of Transnational Business Problems (7th ed. 2024) and Transnational Litigation in a Nutshell (2d ed. 2021). His articles on international law and transnational litigation have appeared in journals such as the Columbia Law Review, the Harvard Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal.
Extraterritoriality in Flux
Earlier this month, at the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools, TLB Editors Maggie Gardner, Bill Dodge, and Hannah Buxbaum participated in a panel organized by the Section on Conflicts of Law entitled “Extraterritoriality in Flux.” This post summarizes their remarks. Maggie Gardner: It’s Time to Look Beyond the Presumption Against Extraterritoriality…
Continue ReadingFifth Circuit Interprets Copyright Termination and Renewal Provisions to Apply Worldwide
In recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court has relied increasingly on the presumption against extraterritoriality to determine the geographic scope of federal statutes. This presumption seems particularly strong for intellectual property statutes. Most recently, the Court strictly applied the presumption against extraterritoriality to the Lanham Act (the federal trademark statute) in Abitron Austria GmbH v….
Continue ReadingChina’s Covid Countersuit
As the Covid pandemic raged in 2020, plaintiffs began filing suits in U.S. courts seeking damages from the People’s Republic of China and other Chinese defendants. In March 2025, a U.S. district court awarded the State of Missouri a default judgment for $24 billion against nine Chinese defendants. In November 2025, another district court awarded…
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