William Dodge

UC Davis School of Law

William Dodge

William S. Dodge (@ProfBillDodge) is Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law and John D. Ayer Chair in Business Law at the University of California, Davis, School of Law. 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 member of the Department of State’s Advisory Committee on International Law and an Adviser for the American Law Institute’s Restatement (Third) of Conflict of Laws. Professor Dodge is the co-author of Transnational Litigation in a Nutshell (2d ed. 2021) and Transnational Business Problems (6th ed. 2019). 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.

Posts by William Dodge

D.C. Circuit Defines “Venture” Under the TVPRA

On March 5, 2024, the D.C. Circuit issued its long-awaited opinion in Doe v. Apple, a suit against U.S. tech companies seeking to hold them liable under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) for forced labor and human trafficking used to mine cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). (Disclosure: I joined…

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Second Circuit Hears Halkbank Oral Argument

On February 28, 2024, the Second Circuit heard oral argument in United States v. Turkiye Halk Bankasi A.S. From the judges’ questions—which admittedly came almost exclusively from Judge Bianco—the panel seems likely to hold that Halkbank, a Turkish state-owned bank, is not immune under federal common law from criminal prosecution for violating U.S. sanctions on Iran. That…

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Choice of Law in the American Courts in 2023

The thirty-seventh annual survey on choice of law in the American courts is now available on SSRN. The survey covers significant cases decided in 2023 on choice of law, party autonomy, extraterritoriality, international human rights, foreign sovereign immunity, adjudicative jurisdiction, and the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments. So, on this leap day, we thought…

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