Law Commons^™

Personal Jurisdiction And National Sovereignty, Ray Worthy Campbell

Washington and Lee Law Review

State sovereignty, once seemingly sidelined in personal jurisdiction analysis, has returned with a vengeance. Driven by the idea that states must not offend rival states in their jurisdictional reach, some justices have looked for specific targeting of individual states as individual states by the defendant in order to justify an assertion of personal jurisdiction. To allow cases to proceed based on national targeting alone, they argue, would diminish the sovereignty of any state that the defendant had specifically targeted.

This Article looks for the first time at how this emphasis on state sovereignty limits national sovereignty, especially where alien defendants …

The Overlooked Costs Of Religious Deference, Robin Fretwell Wilson

Washington and Lee Law Review

Citing the Qur'an, a German divorce court judge this year denied a fast track divorce to a Muslim woman who had been the victim of domestic violence and death threats from her husband. The judge rejected her application because the husband's exercise of his "right to castigate does not fulfill the hardship criteria" for an expedited divorce. The decision, which sparked a firestorm of controversy, comes at an important time in the movement to embrace pluralistic understandings of family relationships. Scholars and policymakers around the world are advancing various schemes for sharing state control over domestic disputes with religious groups-ranging …