Agrégateur de flux

To celebrate its 150th birthday, the Société de législation comparée is organizing a comparative law essay competition. It is open to all lawyers, of all nationalities, regardless of their speciality. Membership of the Society is not required to participate.

Entrants will compose, on a subject of their choice, an essay which is supported by comparative legal reasoning.

The submitted text must be unpublished, never formally examined and contain at least 100,000 characters. It can be written in French or English. Entrants must send a print and an electronic version of the text to the Société de législation comparée, 28 rue Saint-Guillaume, 75007 Paris, France and emmanuelle.bouvier@legiscompare.com no later than October 15, 2019. The application form must be attached to the text.

The selection committee will present the results of its deliberations at the Society’s birthday colloquium in December 2019. First prize will be the publication of the text by the Society in the form of a book. Other awards may be given to distinguished candidates by the committee. Other forms of publications may also be proposed.

To download the application form, please click here.

The Editors of the Melbourne Journal of International Law (‘MJIL’), Australia’s premier generalist international law journal, are now inviting submissions for volume 20(2). MJIL is a peer-reviewed academic journal, based at the University of Melbourne.

The deadline for submissions is July 1, 2019. Submissions and inquiries should be directed to law-mjil@unimelb.edu.au. For more information, please visit https://law.unimelb.edu.au/mjil#submissions.

As previously reported on Conflicts of Laws, the ECtHR was requested an advisory opinion by the French Court of Cassation.

On April 10th, the ECtHR delivered its first advisory opinion. It held that:

“In a situation where a child was born abroad through a gestational surrogacy arrangement and was conceived using the gametes of the intended father and a third-party donor, and where the legal parent-child relationship with the intended father has been recognised in domestic law,

1. the child’s right to respect for private life within the meaning of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights requires that domestic law provide a possibility of recognition of a legal parent-child relationship with the intended mother, designated in the birth certificate legally established abroad as the “legal mother”;
2. the child’s right to respect for private life does not require such recognition to take the form of entry in the register of births, marriages and deaths of the details of the birth certificate legally established abroad; another means, such as adoption of the child by the intended mother, may be used”.

For a brief summary of the advisory opinion and the case background see the Press Release.

For further details see the Advisory Opinion.

The fifth edition of the annual conference of the Carlos III University of Madrid devoted to private international law will take place on 25 and 26 April 2019. This year’s topic is surrogacy.

Speakers include Javier Carrascosa González (Univ. Murcia), Cristina González Beilfus (Univ. Barcelona), Iván Heredia Cervantes (Univ. Autónoma Madrid), Ilaria Pretelli (Swiss Institute of Comparative Law), and Fabrizio Marongiu Buonaiuti (Univ. Macerata).

See here for the full programme and further information.

The e-Codex Plus project and the ERC project team Building EU Civil Justice of the Erasmus School of Law are jointly organising the conference ‘e’ meets justice: building bridges in cross-border procedures. On 2 and 3 May 2019, academics, IT and legal professionals will meet in Lisbon to discuss how to improve the collaboration between these communities in cross-border civil procedures. The aim of the conference is to offer a platform for different stakeholders to meet, engage in discussions and exchange ideas in order to find a meeting point between the legal world and the digital world, arriving at ‘e-justice’. Focusing on e-CODEX as a potential tool to improve the current situation, participants will be encouraged to propose ideas, engage in discussions and develop a mind-set to foster the future of e-Justice in the EU.

In recent years, cross-border (e-)commerce has increased rapidly. In particular, e-commerce enabled consumers to engage in online transactions with traders from outside their jurisdictions. This development resulted in a growing number of cross-border (online) disputes. While the number of disputes surges, there is a lack of suitable redress mechanisms for consumers, posing challenges to access justice. Consumers encounter obstacles to find a remedy for their cross-border claims, due to differences in language, increased costs, longer procedures, and various diverging legal procedures. It is important that justice embraces technology in order to support online and offline consumers. For a smooth functioning of the Internal Market, it is essential that the consumer has trust and confidence to make (online) cross-border purchases. Therefore, the European Union has been active in creating consumer protection legislation, both in substantive law and more recently in procedural law. Cross-border procedures exist, but their accurate functioning requires that infrastructure must be interlinked and coherent, and should enable more dialogue between stakeholders. In this regard, e-CODEX can be a valuable tool to provide the digital exchange of case related data, connecting parties and courts in a single interface.

You can find more information on the programme on: https://www.e-codex.eu/e-meets-justice-conference. Do you want to be part of this lively and thought-provoking dialogue? You can register now by sending an email to: aanmelden@minvenj.nl.

République tchèque / Parlement et Conseil
Politique industrielle
L’avocate générale Sharpston propose à la Cour de rejeter le recours formé par la République tchèque contre l’acte de droit de l’Union introduisant des règles plus strictes pour l’acquisition et la détention d’armes à feu

On 15 April 2019 eleven international publishing will host an event on “Choice of Law in International Contracts” to honor the publication of Dr Gustavo Moser’s book Rethinking Choice of Law in Cross-Border Sales. The event will take place from 1 to 5 pm in the  Salon Franz Josef, Hotel Regina, Rooseveltplatz 15, 1090 Vienna, Austria. Topics will include:

• Choice of Law and Brexit
• Drafting Choice of Law Clauses
• CISG Status and Prospects 

1:00 pm – 3:00 pm| Roundtable Lunch with the Stakeholders

Speakers: Professor Ingeborg Schwenzer; Louise Barrington; Dr Patricia Shaughnessy; Michael McIlwrath; Luca Castellani; Dr Florian Mohs; and Dr Sabrina Strassburger

Moderator: Dr Gustavo Moser

3:30 pm – 5:00 pm| Coffee & Tea Talk

Speakers: Professor Ingeborg Schwenzer; Professor Petra Butler; Professor Andrea Bjorklund; and Dr Lisa Spagnolo

Moderator: Dr Gustavo Moser

An interesting comparison may be made between [2019] SGHC 53 Re Zetta Jet Pte Ltd and [2018] EWHC 2186 (Ch) Videology on which I reported here. Both concern recognition of foreign main (or not) proceeding under of the UNCITRAL Model Law on Cross-Border Insolvency (“the Model Law”). Zetta Jet came to me courtesy of my former student Filbert Lam, and has now also been analysed to great effect by Tan Meiyen and colleagues here.

The judgment is a master class on COMI determination, but also on comparative legal analysis re time of filing etc.: best read judgment and Tan’s note for oneself. Of particular note are

• the expression of sympathy by Aedit Abdullah J for forum shopping in insolvency law; compare also with Ocean Rig, and Kekhman; here this took the particular form of following the US approach to selecting the date on which the application for recognition is filed, as relevant to COMI determination (friendlier to forum shopping than te EU’s and England’s date of commencement of the foreign insolvency proceedings);
• the emphasis on the basket of criteria required to identify COMI;
• the narrow approach to ordre public despite Singaporean court order having been defied; yet also the relevance of the fact that these orders post defiance had been varied.

Geert.

(Handbook of) EU private international law, 2nd ed. 2016, Chapter 5, Heading 5.6.1 et al.

Mineur