Agrégateur de flux

The latest issue of “Rabels Zeitschrift für ausländisches und internationales Privatrecht  – The Rabel Journal of Comparative and International Private Law” (RabelsZ) has recently been released. It contains the following articles:

Dagmar Coester-Waltjen, Himmel und Hölle: Einige Überlegungen zur internationalen Zuständigkeit (Heaven and Hell: Some Reflections on International Jurisdiction)

Jurisdictional rules differ all over the world. Plaintiffs might consider jurisdictional practices in one legal system as “heaven”, whereas defendants will fear exactly these rules like “hell”. Due to increasing global interconnectedness that results from increasing cross-border trade, from the mobility of people, and the global reach of the internet, there is a need for international consensus on matters of jurisdiction on several levels. The first level concerns the question whether a complete set of acceptable grounds of jurisdiction (direct grounds of jurisdictions) can be developed for a binding instrument. On the second level the question arises as to tolerable heads of jurisdiction (only) for the purpose of recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments (indirect grounds of jurisdiction). And finally the jurisdiction of the courts that recognize and enforce the foreign judgment is at issue. The Hague Conference on Private International Law has resumed its work on the so-called judgment project and it is working on all three levels although direct grounds of jurisdiction will be tackled only after a certain agreement will have been reached on jurisdictional issues concerning recognition and enforcement of judgments. However, on all three levels the inclusion and the role of the doctrine of forum non conveniens will be an important and most decisive issue.

The doctrine of forum non conveniens has its origin in the common law world, but has spread around the globe in recent decades. Today it can be found also in jurisdictions which traditionally apply strict jurisdictional rules. The very essence of the doctrine is a margin of discretion the competent court may apply in staying or rejecting litigation. This applies if in the given situation the court addressed seems to be a “not convenient” forum and there is another more appropriate forum. The particulars of the doctrine as well as the standards of the test (inconvenient, clearly inconvenient, more appropriate) and the determinative considerations vary.

By contrast, it has been said that the European rules on jurisdiction are and have to be strict rules in order to guarantee certainty and predictability. However, a close look at these jurisdictional systems in European regulations reveal some weakness of the strict rules on the one hand and also the fact that even in these systems a non-convenience substitute has been developed. There are rules which allow courts to deny jurisdiction by way of interpreting a jurisdictional rule restrictively in the light of specific circumstances of the case at hand. There are other rules which give judges a limited power to decline (or in case of a forum necessitatis even to attract) jurisdiction outside the normal rules. In this situation forum non conveniens-type considerations are at issue. In so far the acceptability of the doctrine of forum non conveniens in a global instrument concerning jurisdiction even for continental-European legal systems and the EU as such does not seem unthinkable any more.

This applies especially as far as direct jurisdiction is concerned. Globalization of the markets and of societies as well as the delocalisation of the connecting factors ask for wide jurisdictional rules which may have to be restricted with regard to the specific and limited circumstances of the precise facts of a case.

Concerns about “access to justice”, “the right to a lawful judge”, non-discriminatory decisions, predictability and certainty of the jurisdictional system can be rebutted if the terms and conditions of a rule on forum non conveniens are framed accordingly: A presumption that honours the plaintiff ’s choice of court may only be rebutted, if the defendant proves that the interests of both parties and the end of justice justify a stay or denial of the proceedings. He will have to prove in addition that there is an alternative appropriate forum which guarantees a lawful procedure and a possibility for the plaintiff to enforce his right when granted by this alternative court. Much will depend on the phrasing of the rule, but there are models for orientation.

When it comes to indirect jurisdiction the doctrine of forum non conveniens for constitutional reasons plays an important role in the United States. It seems unlikely that an agreement on the international level will be reached without coping with this issue. However, forum non conveniens may have a very limited role on this level only. Due to the fact that in so far practical difficulties for the original forum in adjudicating the case are not at issue any more, the essential issue will be whether the interests of the defendant have been treated in accordance with the rule of law. This could be argued under the head of “ordre public”, but it seems preferable to define the limits of such exception expressly.

Finally, the jurisdictional rules of the courts recognizing and enforcing foreign judgments are of pivotal importance. Without the possibility of enforcement a right may be theoretical and illusionary only. Therefore, in order to guarantee practical and effective rights, a legal system must not refrain from enforcing a judgment according to the doctrine of forum non conveniens if and so far as this judgment has to be recognized in this system. Thus, on the third stage of jurisdictional issue the doctrine of forum non conveniens should not play any role at all.

Rolf Wagner, EU-Kompetenz in der justiziellen Zusammenarbeit in Zivilsachen – Resumée und Ausblick nach mehr als fünfzehn Jahren (EU Legislative Powers Regarding Judicial Cooperation in Civil Matters)

Since the entry into force of the Amsterdam Treaty in 1999, the European Union has been empowered to cooperate in the area of civil matters. As this power has now existed for more than fifteen years, it seems appropriate to take stock of developments. In addition to asking whether initial legal uncertainties regarding the interpretation of the power of judicial cooperation in civil matters have been resolved over the course of time, the present article also considers what new problems may have emerged.

Chloé Lignier and Anton Geier, Die Verstärkte Zusammenarbeit in der Europäischen Union – Politischer Hintergrund, Bestandsaufnahme und Zukunftsperspektiven (Enhanced Cooperation in the European Union – Political Background, Current Status and Future Perspectives)

The legislative instrument of enhanced cooperation allows member states to create a common legal regime in a given field, which applies only to those member states that voluntarily subject themselves to it. While the concept of having different levels of integration (“differentiated integration”) as such is not new to EU law, the instrument of enhanced cooperation stands out through its broad scope of application and its elaborate institutional entrenchment.

The history of differentiated integration in the EU illustrates the basic conflict between effective integration on the one hand and preserving the sovereignty of the member states on the other hand. In this context, the two principal competing political ideals aspiring to resolve this conflict are often labelled as “Europe à la carte” on the one hand and “multi-speed Europe” on the other hand. Both ideals – to a varying degree – manifest themselves in the rules on enhanced cooperation introduced with the treaties of Amsterdam and Nice.

After having been neglected by the European legislator for a long time, we can now witness the first practical implementations of enhanced cooperation in the fields of divorce law, patents and the financial transaction tax. The ideas of differentiated integration and the instrument of enhanced cooperation remain highly controversial. Some see it as the only means for overcoming the integrational standstill in an ever more complex and heterogenic Union. Others fear that enhanced cooperation will sow division among the member states and foster political and legal alienation between them.

Ultimately, an analysis of the rules on enhanced cooperation in the treaties and the latest examples of its implementation gives rise to optimism. It reveals a promising potential of the instrument of enhanced cooperation for achieving effective integration in the EU, while duly observing the legitimate interests of all member states, be they participating or not. At the same time, the European legislator should wield its new sword with caution if it wishes to preserve the solidarity among the member states and the coherence of EU law. It cannot be denied that specific projects of enhanced cooperation can come into conflict with other EU interests such as the coherence and effectiveness of the internal market. As regards the political coherence of the EU, the provisions on sincere cooperation do allow for political inclusion and wisely oblige the participating member states to confer with the non-participants at every stage. The extent to which the member states act in this spirit of constructiveness and cooperation will decide over the fate of enhanced cooperation as either a king’s road or a dead end of European legal integration.

Marieke Oderkerk, The Need for a Methodological Framework for Comparative Legal Research – Sense and Nonsense of “Methodological Pluralism” in Comparative Law

The paper has presented a framework for comparative legal research indicating the various methodological issues that have to be considered in the various stages of a research project. Its significance is twofold. In the first place it brings order into the existing methodological knowledge in the field such that the various methods and techniques can be understood and assessed within the correct context, automatically unveiling existing lacunae. Secondly, and probably most importantly, the framework shows that there is indeed one framework which contains – at the moment at least, for certain parts of it – clear guidelines and principles that can guide comparatists conducting any type of comparative legal research in any field of the law.

Dieter Martiny, Die Haager Principles on Choice of Law in International Commercial Contracts – Eine weitere Verankerung der Parteiautonomie (The Hague Principles on Choice of Law in International Commercial Contracts: Buttressing Party Autonomy)

The Hague Conference on Private International Law has recently drawn up “Principles on Choice of Law in International Commercial Contracts”. An innovative  feature of these Principles, which are accompanied by an explanatory Commentary, is that unlike an international convention they are non-binding. The Principles were drafted by a Working Group, which commenced in 2010, and by a Special Commission of November 2012. The instrument was approved by the Council on  General Affairs and Policy in March 2015.

The Principles’ relatively few black-letter rules (12 articles and a preamble) seek to encourage choice of law in international commercial transactions. They contain clarifications and innovations on choice of law, particularly for jurisdictions where party autonomy is not accepted or is accepted only in a restrictive manner. The Principles try to achieve universal application and also to influence existing regional instruments such as the Rome I Regulation of the European Union and the OAS Mexico Convention.

Developing the Principles was a demanding task since they apply not only to courts but also to arbitral tribunals. Since party autonomy is the centrepiece of the Hague Principles, freedom of choice is granted basically without restriction. The Principles clarify important issues for agreements on choice of law. A reference to “law” also includes generally accepted “rules of law”. The latter refers to principles developed by international organisations or international conventions. This approach is also applicable to courts. Under he Hague Principles the parties’ choice of law is severable from the main contract. Express and tacit choices are accepted. There is no requirement as to the formal validity of a choice of law. An innovative solution also tries to find an agreement on choice of law in the case of a battle of the forms. Not only are international mandatory rules of the forum respected but under certain circumstances mandatory provisions from other sources are also taken into account. The extent to which overriding mandatory rules and public policy are applied or taken into account, however, is ultimately a matter not for the non-binding Principles themselves but for other rules.

The Hague Principles declare themselves to be an international code of current best practice with respect to the recognition of party autonomy in choice of law in international commercial contracts. Their acceptance in international practice will show how far the expectations of The Hague will be met.

Allemagne / Commission
SANT
Après le Tribunal, la Cour confirme elle aussi l’interdiction faite par la Commission à l’Allemagne de maintenir ses valeurs limites pour l’arsenic, l’antimoine et le mercure dans les jouets

Commission / Irlande
SOPO
La Commission n’a pas réussi à prouver un manquement de l’Irlande dans la mise en œuvre de la directive sur le temps de travail pour les médecins hospitaliers non consultants

InnoLux / Commission
Concurrence
La Cour confirme l’amende de 288 millions d’euros infligée à InnoLux pour sa participation à l’entente sur le marché des panneaux LCD

K et A
Espace de liberté, sécurité et justice
Les États membres peuvent exiger que les ressortissants de pays tiers réussissent un examen d’intégration civique préalablement au regroupement familial

Commission / France
Aide d'État
La France a manqué à ses obligations en s’abstenant de récupérer l’aide de 220 millions d’euros accordée à la SNCM au titre de certains services de transport maritime assurés entre Marseille et la Corse

Enquête préliminaire ; Criminalité organisée

Vente immobilière

Call for Papers on Private International Law, Economics, and Development

The Federalist Society’s Faculty Division is pleased to announce a Call for Papers on Private International Law, Economics, and Development.  Up to four submissions will be selected for inclusion in an upcoming Faculty Division colloquium on this topic.  Authors of the selected pieces will each receive a prize of approximately $2,500 (any co-authors must share a single prize).  The topic is intentionally broad in scope, though we have a particular interest in papers that offer fresh perspectives or insights on the relationship between private international law, economics, and development.

The Private International Law, Economics, and Development colloquium is intended to engage private international law from a legal, economics, and public policy perspective—particularly the seeming lack of international agreement on how trade should be encouraged and regulated. Some contend legal regimes that promote free trade will benefit all of society, while others argue that such an approach benefits the relatively wealthy at the expense of the relatively poor. Fitted within this larger debate of politics and economics is the important question of what role, if any, private international law should play in promoting and regulating transnational activity.  Winning submissions will be incorporated into a special colloquium session, during which we hope to engage some of the latest thinking on these issues.

The winning authors will be expected to attend the colloquium (Oct. 9-10, 2015), which we plan to hold in the Los Angeles area, but not to present their papers in the formal sense; rather, all participants will have read the papers beforehand and will come prepared to engage in a freewheeling discussion on the issues the papers raise.  Submissions will be accepted from current law faculty or those pursuing full-time employment in the legal academy.

There is a limit of one submission per person.

Submissions must be substantially complete and formatted in accord with the Bluebook.  Submissions should be of a quality publishable in a mainstream law journal, but must not have been published as of the date of the submission deadline below.  This must be the case even if the paper has been accepted for publication in a journal or law review.

Submissions must be sent via Microsoft Word or pdf attachment to anthony.deardurff@fed-soc.org no later than 5:00pm Eastern Time on Friday July 31, 2015.

 

Guest Post by Professor Marketa Trimble (UNLV) (also posted at this blog). 

Imagine that someone had a patent on the internet and only those who had a license from the patent holder could, for example, do business on the internet. This internet patent would not need to concern the internet protocol, the domain name system, or any other technical features of the network; the patent could, in fact, cover something else – a technology that everyone, or almost everyone, who wants to do business on the internet needs, a technology that is not, however, a technical standard. There might be one such patent application – the patent application discussed below – that could be approaching this scenario.

We must accept, however reluctantly, that activities on the internet will not be governed by a single internet-specific legal regime or by the legal regime of a single country. Although countries might agree on an internet-specific regime for the technical features of the internet, and might even adopt some uniform laws, countries want to maintain some of their country-specific national laws. People and nations around the world are different, and they will always have diverse views on a variety of matters – for example, online gambling. Online gambling might be completely acceptable in some countries, completely unacceptable in others, or somewhere in between; likewise, countries have different understandings of privacy and requirements for the protection of personal data. Therefore, countries now have and likely always will have different national laws on online gambling and different national laws on privacy and personal data protection. Compliance with multiple countries’ laws regarding the internet is nonnegotiable, certainly for those private parties who wish to conduct their activities on the internet transnationally and legally. Nevertheless, in practice and for some matters, the number of countries whose laws are likely to be raised against an actor on the internet may be limited, as I discussed recently.

For some time the major excuse for noncompliance with the laws of multiple countries on the internet was the ubiquitousness of the network. The network’s technical characteristics seemed to make it impossible for actors to both limit their activity on the internet territorially, and also to identify with a sufficient degree of reliability the location of parties and events on the internet, such as customers and their place of consumption. However, as geolocation and geoblocking tools developed, location identification and territorial limitation of access became feasible. Of course the increase in the use of geolocation tools generated more interest in the evasion of geolocation, and increased evasion has prompted even further improvements of the tools. The argument that we cannot limit or target our activity territorially because we don’t know where our content is accessed or consumed no longer seems valid. (Also – at least in some countries – courts and agencies have permitted internet actors to employ low-tech solutions as sufficient territorial barriers, for example, disclaimers and specific language versions.)

The multiplicity of applicable laws that originate in different countries and apply to activities on the internet is more troubling in some areas of law than in others. One area of law that permeates most internet activity is data privacy and personal data protection. Any internet actor who has customers and users (and therefore probably has user and traffic analytics) will likely encounter national data protection laws, which vary country-by-country (even in the EU countries, which have harmonized their personal data protection laws, national implementing regulations may impose country-specific obligations). Therefore, compliance with the varying national data protection laws will become one of the essential components of conducting business and other activities transnationally. If someone could patent a method for complying simultaneously with multiple countries’ data privacy laws on the internet and claim the method broadly enough to cover all possible methods of achieving compliance with the national privacy laws, that patent owner might just as well own a patent on the internet, or at least on a very large percentage of internet activity.

A U.S. patent application that seeks a patent on simultaneous compliance with multiple countries’ data privacy laws on the internet through broad method claims is application No. 14/266,525, which concerns “Systems and Methods of Automated Compliance with Data Privacy Laws,” meaning “laws of varying jurisdictions” (the title and the “Abstract”). The invention is designed to facilitate an automatic method of complying with the data privacy laws of various jurisdictions, which are, as the “Introduction” notes, “complicated, diverse, and jurisdiction specific.” The method envisions that once “person-related data” are requested from a data provider, a “filter is the [sic] automatically applied to the person-related data to restrict transfer of person-related data [that] does [sic] not meet the data privacy regulations applicable to the jurisdiction” (the “Introduction”); the filter also checks for any consents by the data subject if the particular regulations require them. The method also foresees, for example, the possibility of “identif[ying] different origins of the person-related data sources” in terms of their geographical location (“Trust Object and Trust Data”).

The patent application still must be prosecuted, and the – undeniably useful – invention will be subject to scrutiny as to its compliance with the requirements of statutory subject matter, novelty, and non-obviousness. A patent on the application may not issue at all, or the language of the application may be amended and the claims narrowed. Whatever the future might bring for the claimed invention, this patent application serves as a useful prompt for thinking about the components that have been or are becoming essential to conducting business and other activities on the internet.

Travel is a wonderful opportunity to catch up on reading back issues of The Economist. Now I have made a valiant effort in recent years to reduce the pile. I am now only a few months behind. (I read the magazine diagonally when it comes out. Properly a little later). In the issue of 28 February of this year, there is a report on the town of Windsor, New York, along with 14 other towns along New York’s border with Pennsylvania, wanting to secede and join Penn. I have not been able to get an update on the state of affairs, and I am not sure whether the idea got much traction.

It is the ultimate answer to regulatory competition: to move an entire slice of territory into what is perceived as a preferable regulatory regime. The cause? New York’s strict (some might say: cautious) policy on fracking /shale gas. Penn State is fracking friendly. New York has banned it.

The Economist also flag that State secession in the US has only ever succeeded in 1777: when a chunk of New York became Vermont. Now, that’s a State where others pack and move to in upwards harmonisation fashion: for Vermont is arguably the top of the regulatory curve when it comes to environment and food regulation.

Geert.

Federcoopesca e.a. / Commission
Agriculture
Des associations de pêcheurs italiens ne peuvent pas contester devant le Tribunal de l’UE un plan d’action prévoyant des mesures nationales dans le domaine, notamment, de la pêche à l’espadon

Le refus de transcrire, à l’état civil français, l’acte de naissance étranger d’un enfant né à l’étranger des suites d’une gestation pour autrui et ayant un parent français ne peut plus être justifié par la seule existence de la convention de GPA dès lors que l’acte de naissance litigieux mentionne en qualité de père et mère les véritables parents biologiques de l’enfant.

En carrousel matière:  Oui

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