Agrégateur de flux

Halsbury’s Laws of Canada (first edition) has published a reissue (September 2016) of its volume on Conflict of Laws.  It is written by Professor Janet Walker, the author of the leading Canadian textbook in the field.  The reissue is highly detailed with over 260 pages of tables (cases, conventions, legislation), an index and a glossary.  The substantive content runs to over 600 pages including lengthy footnotes.  The reissue can be purchased as a stand-alone reference (without buying the entire Halsbury’s collection) for conflict of laws in Canada (publisher information available here).

I reported earlier on the AG’s Opinion in C‑428/15, Child and Family Agency. The Court held late October. It first of all confirms earlier case-law relating to the interpretation of the notion ‘civil matters’, with reference to the need for autonomous interpretation. ‘Civil matters’ may include adoption of child protection measures, including cases where those measures are considered, under the domestic law of a Member State, to be governed by public law (at 32).

More fundamentally, the question of forum non conveniens. Article 15(1) of Regulation No 2201/2003 provides that the courts of a Member State having jurisdiction as to the substance of a case may request the transfer of that case, or a specific part thereof, to a court of another Member State with which the child has a particular connection, if they consider that that court is better placed to hear the case, and where the transfer is in the best interests of the child. Article 15(3) lists exhaustively the factors that can be taken into account in this respect.

Not surprisingly of course the CJEU puts the interests of the child at the core of its analysis. The criterion of proximity (leading to the principal jurisdiction for the courts of the habitual residence of the child) can only be set aside if there are facts-specific considerations that to do so is in the better interest of the child.

Article 15(3) being an exhaustive list, the Court is not willing to consider any other consideration: the impact of the referral on the free movement rights of others, in particular the parents, can not be of any relevance, lest such impact in turn has an impact on the free movement of the child itself. Moreover, the concern of the Irish court that referred, namely that a transfer of children from the UK to Ireland (following the parent’s exercise of her freedom of movement), thus amending their habitual residence, may be an abusive form of forum shopping, cannot be a relevant consideration.

Geert.

Maria Hook, The Choice of Law Contract, Hart Publishing, 2016,  ISBN 9781849467643, pp. 288, GBP 60.

This book offers a contractual framework for the regulation of party autonomy in choice of law. The party autonomy rule is the cornerstone of any modern system of choice of law; embodying as it does the freedom enjoyed by parties to a cross-border legal relationship to agree on the law applicable to it. However, as this study shows, the rule has a major shortcoming because it fails to give due regard to the contractual function of the choice of law agreement. The study examines the existing law on choice of law agreements, by reference to the law of both common and civil law jurisdictions and international instruments. Moreover, it suggests a new coherent approach to party autonomy that integrates both the law of contract and choice of law. This important new study should be read with interest by private international law scholars.

La Cour de justice de l’Union européenne a confirmé l’analyse du Tribunal sur les relations financières entre l’État et Orange concernant la retraite des fonctionnaires employés par cette société.

en lire plus

I have been very kindly invited to be the speaker of the Forum Conveniens Annual Lecture at the University of Edinburgh this year. It is with great pleasure that I announce it will take place on Wednesday 23rd November 2016, under the title “Farewell, UK. Stocktaking Time for a Continental Europe’s Area of Civil Justice”. Start is foreseen at 6.00pm, at the following venue: LG.10, David Hume Tower, EH8 9JX.

Attendance is free, however registration is required. For more information  please contact:
Professor Gerry Maher (Gerard.Maher@ed.ac.uk or Dr
Veronica Ruiz Abou Nigm (V.Ruiz.Abou-Nigm@ed.ac.uk)

Forum Conveniens is a forum based at Edinburgh Law School and dedicated to International Private Law (Private International Law). Its base in Edinburgh reflects the distinctive role of Scots law in the development of the subject but at the same time the focus of the Forum is international.

It provides a means of bringing together interested parties (including academic lawyers, practitioners, the judiciary, law reformers, and policy makers) for discussion and exchange of ideas in private international law.

Propriété industrielle ; Compétence

Protection des droits de la personne - Informatique et libertés

Sécurité sociale, assurances sociales - Vieillesse - Pension

Statut collectif du travail ; Preuve
- Conventions et acords collectifs

Bail commercial

Bail commercial

Edina Márton, Violations of Personality Rights through the Internet – Jurisdictional Issues under European Law, Nomos / Hart Publishing, 2016, ISBN 9781509908028, pp. 384, GBP 95.

This book considers jurisdictional issues on violations of personality rights through the Internet under the so-called ‘Brussels-Lugano Regime’ and centres on the special rule of jurisdiction in matters relating to tort, delict, or quasi-delict. It notes the governing objectives and underlying principles of this special rule; analyses its interpretation through the judgments of the ECJ, especially Bier, Shevill, and eDate and Martinez; and explores views expressed in legal theory and national judicial practice regarding its application for localising online violations of personality rights. The book aims to examine how the eDate and Martinez approaches advance administrability, predictability, and litigational justice and to assess whether they are suitable jurisdictional bases in Europe, where common legal norms, interests, and values increasingly integrate and connect persons. It concludes that they are not and recommends their possible reform.

Professor Massimo Benedettelli (University of Bari “Aldo Moro”) has just published a highly noteworthy article entitled “Five Lay Commandments for the EU Private International Law of Companies” in the 17th Volume of the Yearbook of Private International Law (2015/2016).

The author has kindly provided us with the following abstract:

‘While praising European company law as a “cornerstone of the internal market”, the EU institutions have devoted limited attention to issues of competent jurisdiction, applicable law and recognition of judgments which necessarily arise when companies carry out their business on a cross-border basis. This is a paradox, especially if one considers that in this area the EU often follows a policy of “minimal harmonization” of the laws of the Member States and that this policy leads to the co-existence of a variety of different rules and institutions directly or indirectly impinging on the regulation of companies, thus to possible conflicts of jurisdictions and/or laws. The European Court of Justice’s “Centros doctrine” fills this gap only partially: this is due not only to the inherent limits of its case-law origin, but also to various hidden assumptions and corollaries on which it appears to be grounded and which still need to be unearthed. Hence, time has come for a better coordination of the legal systems of the Member States in the field of company law, possibly through the enactment of an ad hoc instrument. To be properly carried out, however, such coordination requires a preliminary clarification of what the EU private international law of companies really is and how it should be handled at the current stage of the European integration. This article tries to contribute to such clarification by proposing five main guidelines, in the form of “commandments” for the European legislator, courts and practitioners. It is submitted that, first, one should understand the different scope of the three legal disciplines (EU law, private international law and company law) which interact in this field so as to assess when and to what extent the lack of coordination of the Member States’ domestic laws may affect the achievement of the objectives pursued by the EU. As a second analytical step, the impact that the EU constitutional principles of subsidiarity and proportionality may have on the scope of the relevant regulatory powers of the EU and of the Member States should be determined. Third, the issue of “characterization” should be addressed so that the boundaries of company law vis-à-vis neighbouring disciplines (capital markets law, insolvency law, contract law, tort law) are fixed throughout the entire EU legal space in a uniform and consistent way. Fourth, the Member States’ legal systems should be coordinated on the basis of the “jurisdictional approach” method (which de facto inspires the ECJ in Centros and its progenies) by granting a role of prominence to the Member State under the laws of which a company has been incorporated. Fifth, any residual conflict which may still arise among different Member States in the regulation of a given company should be resolved, in principle, by respecting the will of the parties to the corporate contract and the rights “to incorporate” and “to re-incorporate” which they enjoy under EU law. In the author’s opinion, an EU private international law of companies developed on the basis of these guidelines not only would achieve a fair balance between the needs of the integration and the Member States’ sovereignty, but would also create a framework for a European “market of company law” where a “virtuous” forum and law shopping could be performed in a predictable and regulated way.’