Law Commons^™

The Canon At The Water's Edge, Thomas B. Bennett

Faculty Publications

What motivates substantive presumptions about how to interpret statutes? Are they like statistical heuristics that aim to predict Congress's most likely behavior, or are they meant to protect certain underenforced values against inadvertent legislative encroachment? These two rationales, fact-based and value-based, are the extremes of a continuum. This Note uses the presumption against extraterritoriality to demonstrate this continuum and how a presumption can shift along it. The presumption operates to diminish the likelihood that a federal statute will be read to extend beyond the borders of the United States. The presumption has been remarkably stable for decades despite watershed changes …

Party Autonomy And Access To Justice In The Uncitral Online Dispute Resolution Project, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

The United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) has directed its Working Group III to prepare instruments that would provide the framework for a global system of online dispute resolution (ODR). Negotiations began in December 2010 and have produced an as-yet-incomplete set of procedural rules for ODR. It is anticipated that three other documents will be prepared, addressing substantive principles to be applied in ODR, guidelines and minimum requirements for ODR providers and neutrals, and a cross-border mechanism for enforcement of the resulting ODR decisions on a global basis.

The most difficult issues in the ODR negotiations are centered …

Jurisdiction And Choice Of Law In International Antitrust Law - A Us Perspective, Ralf Michaels, Hannah L. Buxbaum

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Global Legal Pluralism: A Jurisprudence Of Law Beyond Borders (Introduction), Paul Schiff Berman

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

We live in a world of legal pluralism, where a single act or actor is potentially regulated by multiple legal or quasi-legal regimes imposed by state, substate, transnational, supranational, and nonstate communities. Navigating these spheres of complex overlapping legal authority is inevitably confusing, and we cannot expect territorial borders to solve all the problems that arise because legal norms inevitably flow across such borders. At the same time, trying to create one universal set of legal rules is also often unsuccessful because the sheer variety of human communities and interests thwarts such efforts. Instead, we need an alternative jurisprudence, one …

Choice Of Law In Federal Courts: From Erie And Klaxon To Cafa And Shady Grove, Kermit Roosevelt Iii

All Faculty Scholarship

The article offers a new perspective on choice of law in federal courts. I have argued in a series of articles that ordinary choice of law problems are best understood through application of a particular conceptual framework, which I call the two-step model. Rather than thinking of choice of law as some sort of meta-procedure, this model takes it to address two substantive questions: what are the scope of the competing states’ laws, and which should be given priority if they conflict? My previous articles have explored the utility of this framework for tackling some perennial problems in choice of …