Transnational 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 …

Isolating Litigants: A Response To Pamela Bookman, Alan M. Trammell

Scholarly Articles

In a recent article, Litigation Isolationism, Pamela Bookman identifies a phenomenon that similarly changes hue depending on one’s perspective or disposition. Bookman argues that four doctrines (personal jurisdiction, forum non conveniens, abstention comity, and the presumption against extraterritoriality) conspire to make U.S. courts significantly less hospitable to transnational litigation. In Bookman’s assessment, such isolationism is counterproductive because the doctrines often fail to vindicate their stated goals of respecting the separation of powers, international comity, and defendants’ interests. The article is crisp and elegant. It synthesizes disparate areas of law to elucidate a broader development in civil litigation. And it makes …