Law Commons^™

Personal Jurisdiction: The Transnational Difference, Austen L. Parrish

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Article engages with some of the key debates that have emerged among international Iaw and civil procedure scholars by examining the flurry of recent transnational cases that have become a common feature on the U.S. Supreme Court's docket. It makes three principal contributions. First, it explains how the recent decisions involving persona jurisdiction should be understood within, and partly limited to, their international contexts. Disputes in involving non-resident foreign defendants raise different considerations than those involving defendants in the United States, and this Article canvasses those differences. If a concern previously was that courts gave too short shrift to …

Brief Amici Curiae Of Intellectual Property Professors In Support Of Petitioner, No. 18-600, Texas Advanced Optoelectronic Solutions, Inc. V. Renesas Electronics America, Inc., Timothy R. Holbrook, Ann Bartow, Andrew Chin, David C. Hricik, Yvette Joy Liebesman, Lucas Osborn

All Faculty Scholarship

To comply with the obligations of the Uruguay Round Agreements, particularly the Agreement on the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS), Congress amended 35 U.S.C. § 271(a) to make it an act of infringement to “offer to sell” a patented invention within the United States. See Uruguay Round Agreements Act, Pub. L. No. 103-465, §§ 531-533, 108 Stat. 4809 (1994).

The Federal Circuit has interpreted this provision in a manner contrary to the presumption against the extraterritorial reach of United States laws. The Federal Circuit has held that location of the ultimate sale contemplated in the offer controls the …

Data Institutionalism: A Reply To Andrew Woods, Zachary D. Clopton

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In "Against Data Exceptionalism," Andrew K. Woods explores “one of the greatest societal and technological shifts in recent years,” which manifests in the “same old” questions about government power. The global cloud is an important feature of modern technological life that has significant consequences for individual privacy, law enforcement, and governance. Yet, as Woods suggests, the legal challenges presented by the cloud have analogies in age-old puzzles of public and private international law.

Identifying these connections is a conceptual advance, and this contribution should not be understated. But, to my mind, the most telling statement in Woods’s excellent article comes …

Advancing National Intellectual Property Policies In A Transnational Context, Marketa Trimble

Boyd Briefs / Road Scholars

Professor Marketa Trimble presented these materials at the Third International Intellectual Property Scholars Roundtable, which was held at the DePaul University College of Law on May 1, 2014.

Mass Torts And Universal Jurisdiction, Vivian Grosswald Curran

Articles

The technologies of the present era mean that injuries have become more massive in dimension. Mass torts affect greater numbers of people and larger geographical areas. Consequently, they can cross borders, affecting the populations of multiple countries. One of the two mechanisms in tort law for remedying mass catastrophes. restricted to cases involving jus cogens violations (namely, violations of human rights so grave as to be against international customary law, or the "law of nations"), is universal jurisdiction pursuant to the Alien Tort Statute (ATS).

Despite the distinctive official restriction of universal jurisdiction to the criminal law domain in civilian …

State Court International Human Rights Litigation: A Concerning Trend?, Austen L. Parrish

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The brief symposium contribution explores human rights litigation in U.S. state courts under state law. Faced with higher hurdles to successfully asserting Alien Tort Statute claims in U.S. courts and reluctant to re-embrace more traditional international lawmaking, human rights advocates have begun to experiment with alternative strategies for redressing human rights violations. One strategy involves state court litigation. Some commentators believe that state courts may prove more amenable to enforcing and advancing human rights. This symposium contribution explores the parallels between the recent willingness to consider state court litigation to remedy human rights violations occurring abroad and other state court …

International Activity And Domestic Law, Adam I. Muchmore

Journal Articles

This invited essay explores the ways States use their domestic laws to regulate activities that cross national borders. Domestic-law enforcement decisions play an underappreciated role in the development of international regulatory policy, particularly in situations where the enforcing State's power to apply its law extraterritorially is not contested. Collective action problems suggest there will be an undersupply of enforcement decisions that promote global welfare and an oversupply of enforcement decisions that promote national welfare. These collective action problems may be mitigated in part by government networks and other forms of regulatory cooperation.

Evading Legislative Jurisdiction, Austen L. Parrish

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In the last few years, and mostly unnoticed, courts have adopted a radically different approach to issues of legislative jurisdiction. Instead of grappling with the difficult question of whether Congress intended a law to reach beyond U.S. borders, courts have side-stepped it entirely. Courts have done so by redefining the definition of extraterritoriality. Significant and contentious decisions in the Ninth and D.C. Circuits paved the way by holding that not all regulation of overseas foreign conduct is extraterritorial. And then suddenly, last term, the U.S. Supreme Court breathed life into the practice. In its landmark Morrison v. National Australia Bank …

Rehabilitating Territoriality In Human Rights, Austen L. Parrish

Articles by Maurer Faculty

For many years, territorial principles anchored an international system organized around nation-states. Recently, however, the human rights movement has sought to change the state-centric focus of international law and overcome the limitations of a system where the territorial state is the primary actor. The field of human rights has promoted a new legal orthodoxy that places the person at the center of the international legal system. Within this orthodoxy, non-state actors play a prominent role, unilateral domestic lawsuits are promoted, and territorial borders give way when necessary for humanitarian intervention. In contrast, territorial conceptions of international law are viewed as …

Symposium Introduction – Beyond Borders: Extraterritoriality In American Law, Austen L. Parrish

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Morrison, The Effects Test, And The Presumption Against Extraterritoriality: A Reply To Professor Dodge, Austen L. Parrish

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

A New Role For Secondary Proceedings In International Bankruptcies, John A. E. Pottow

Articles

Secondary proceedings-the ugly stepsisters to main proceedings-get short shrift in international bankruptcy scholarship. This article seeks to remedy that deficiency. First, it describes what it argues are the traditional conceptions-both stated and implicit-of secondary proceedings in international bankruptcies. Second, it offers a revised way of thinking about secondary proceedings, proposing to restrict their scope through the use of "synthetic" hearings. Third, it addresses some problems with the proposed new role of secondary proceedings and sketches a possible solution involving the creation of an international priorities registry.

Duplicative Foreign Litigation, Austen L. Parrish

Articles by Maurer Faculty

What should a court do when a lawsuit involving the same parties and the same issues is already pending in the court of another country? With the growth of transnational litigation, the issue of reactive, duplicative proceedings - and the waste inherent in such duplication - becomes a more common problem. The future does not promise change. In a modern, globalized world, litigants are increasingly tempted to forum shop among countries to find courts and law more favorably inclined to them than their opponents.

The federal courts, however, do not yet have a coherent response to the problem. They apply …

The Myth (And Realities) Of Forum Shopping In Transnational Insolvency, John A. E. Pottow

Articles

A decade ago, in 1996, the landscape of transnational insolvencies was vastly different from today. The UNCITRAL Model Law had not been finished, the efforts at the E.U. Insolvency Treaty were jeopardized by mad cows, and no one had heard of Chapter 15. Now, all three universalist projects are up and running, putting universalism in a comfortable state of ascendancy. The paradigm has not been without critics, however, the most persistent and eloquent of which has been Professor Lynn LoPucki. LoPucki has periodically attacked universalism on a number of grounds. These grievances include a sovereigntist complaint of universalism's insensitivity to …

Litigating Canada-U.S. Transboundary Harm: International Environmental Lawmaking And The Threat Of Extraterritorial Reciprocity, Austen L. Parrish, Shi-Ling Hsu

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Article joins a spirited debate ongoing among international law scholars. Numerous articles have debated the changing nature of international law and relations: the impact of globalization, the decline of territorial-sovereignty, the ever important role that non-state actors play, and the growing use of domestic laws to solve transboundary problems. That scholarship, however, often speaks only in general theoretical terms, and has largely ignored how these changes are playing out in countries outside the United States in ways that impact American interests.

This Article picks up where that scholarship leaves off. It examines one of the perennial challenges for international …

Greed And Pride In International Bankruptcy: The Problems Of And Proposed Solutions To 'Local Interests', John A. E. Pottow

Articles

The collapses of Yukos, Parmalat, and other international juggernauts have focused scholarly attention on the failure of multinational enterprises. Even what one might consider "American" companies, such as Chicago-based United Airlines, have made clear in their restructuring plans that their operations have profound effects on the dozens of nations around the globe where they transact business. Government and quasi-government reform efforts to regulate these cross-border insolvencies have abounded, including among others, the UNCITRAL Model Law on Cross-Border Insolvency. UNCITRAL is also building on World Bank and INSOL efforts at promulgating a Legislative Guide for "best practices" bankruptcy codes. Scholars vary …

Trail Smelter Déjà Vu: Extraterritoriality, International Environmental Law And The Search For Solutions To Canadian-U.S. Transboundary Water Pollution Disputes, Austen L. Parrish

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In the 1930s, a privately owned smelting plant in Trail, Canada was the focus of the most famous case in international environmental law: the Trail Smelter Arbitration. But the subject of that landmark case has not gone away. Over the last seventy years, the Trail smelter dumped millions of tons of mercury, arsenic, and toxic waste into the Columbia River. The dumping's effects have been felt in neighboring Washington State, where the toxic discharges have caused environmental harm. In 2003, the EPA began investigating the Washington border area for designation as a Superfund (CERCLA) site, and controversially demanded that the …

Procedural Incrementalism: A Model For International Bankruptcy, John A. E. Pottow

Articles

The headline-grabbing business failures of late have brought increased attention to the relatively unresolved area of multinational bankruptcies. Parmalat, Global Crossing, and United Airlines are among the few international juggernauts that have foundered. In the financial meltdowns of these cross-border institutions, assets and creditors are dispersed throughout commercial environments that rarely end neatly at national borders. There has been heated debate, both in scholarly literature and the practical battlefield, over how best to resolve these transnational insolvencies, and there is nothing yet approaching a consensus. Reform efforts of various stripes have almost uniformly failed to gain meaningful international support. At …

International Tax Law As International Law, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

Is international tax law part of international law? To an international lawyer, the question posed probably seems ridiculous. Of course international tax law is part of international law, just like tax treaties are treaties. But to an international tax lawyer, the question probably seems less obvious, because most international tax lawyers do not think of themselves primarily as international lawyers (public or private), but rather as tax lawyers who happen to deal with crossborder transactions. And indeed, once one delves into the details, it becomes clear that in some ways international tax law is different from "regular" international law. For …

National Regulation Of Multinational Enterprises: An Essay On Comity, Extraterritoriality, And Harmonization, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

Despite the economic importance of multinational enterprises ("MNEs"), there is a surprising paucity of law governing foreign direct investment ("FDI"), especially in comparison with the abundance of law governing trade. There is no multilateral legal arrangement governing FDI that is similar to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade ("GATT"), no organization similar to the World Trade Organization, and almost no courses in law schools on FDI law. The goal of this Article is to begin to remedy this state of affairs by proposing a conceptual model for analyzing the application of the national laws of home and host countries …

The Product/Process Distinction - An Illusory Basis For Disciplining 'Unilateralism' In Trade Policy, Robert L. Howse, Donald H. Regan

Articles

It has become conventional wisdom that internal regulations that distinguish between products on the basis of their production method are GATT-illegal, where applied to restrict imports (although possibly some such measures might be justified as 'exceptions' under Article XX). The aim of this article is to challenge this conventional wisdom, both from a jurisprudential and a policy perspective. First, we argue there is no real support in the text and jurisprudence of the GATT for the product/process distinction. The notion developed in the unadopted Tuna/Dolphin cases that processed-based measures are somehow excluded from the coverage of Article III (National Treatment) …