Jurisprudence Commons^™

The Battle For The Soul Of International Shoe, Eric H. Schepard

Eric H Schepard

In 2011, Justice Kennedy’s plurality opinion in J. McIntyre Machinery, Ltd. v. Nicastro repeatedly cited International Shoe v. Washington, a 1945 decision that transformed the law of personal jurisdiction. Kennedy believed that International Shoe broadly supported his position that a state may hear a suit arising from a within-state workplace injury to its citizen only if the foreign (out-of-state) corporate defendant specifically markets its products to that state. This article reexamines the jurisprudence of International Shoe’s author, Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, to argue that Kennedy hijacked International Shoe’s half-buried legacy of judicial restraint. Scholars have suggested that Stone hoped …

Ending Judgment Arbitrage: Jurisdictional Competition And The Enforcement Of Foreign Money Judgments In The United States, Gregory Shill

Gregory Shill

Recent multi-billion-dollar damage awards issued by foreign courts against large American companies have focused attention on the once-obscure, patchwork system of enforcing foreign-country judgments in the United States. That system’s structural problems are even more serious than its critics have charged. However, the leading proposals for reform overlook the positive potential embedded in its design.

In the United States, no treaty or federal law controls the domestication of foreign judgments; the process is instead governed by state law. Although they are often conflated in practice, the procedure consists of two formally and conceptually distinct stages: foreign judgments must first be …