At the recent Northwestern Law School conference on the Israeli-Arab Dispute and International Law I had the good fortune to address one of the few bright spots in current Arab-Israeli relations. Most international law scholars of the Arab-Israeli conflict seem to know little about international trade, and focus almost exclusively on the laws of war in their discussion of Middle East...
Last week a special committee organized by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has recommended that virtually every clause of the anti-gay bill drafted by Uganda backbencher David Bahati be rejected. As reported here, The recommendations ...
In 1995, while Elena Kagan was an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, she wrote a review about Stephen Carter’s book, The Confirmation Mess. Carter’s book, of course, was highly critical of the confirmation process and identified numerous ailments, including most famously, the handling of the confirmation hearing of Robert Bork. Kagan begs to differ....
Yesterday a federal court in New York granted Chevron's request for discovery of outtakes from the 2009 documentary Crude about the multi-billion dollar litigation in Ecuador. Chevron's request was pursuant to 28 U.S.C. 1782, which authorizes a judge in the United States to order discovery of evidence to be used in proceedings before a foreign tribunal. As reported here, Chevron's...
Kudos to Northwestern's Searle Center on Law, Regulation, and Economic Growth for a wonderful conference on ATS litigation last week. The papers by David Scheffer & Caroline Kaeb, John McGinnis & Ilya Somin, Jide Nzelibe, Michael Barsa & David Dana, Anthea Roberts, and Eugene Kontorovich were all outstanding. There are many topics worthy of retelling, but I wanted...
When I teach International Trade, one of my favorite parts of the class is the discussion of trade linkages. How does a state balance competing concerns such as labor, the environment, and human rights? Typically the WTO accommodates those concerns through the General Exceptions that permit a state to violate the WTO rules if doing so is, say,...
The ABA Journal has an interesting article on the Americanization of international arbitration. There's nothing particularly new to our readers in this article. It's a theme that my friend and colleague Tom Stipanowich has written about extensively. I've written a bit about the subject as well. But the fact that the story is being told in...
A federal district court in Texas has held that the Alien Tort Statute ("ATS") requires allegations of intent to violate international law. The mere knowledge that such violation was occurring, or would occur, is insufficient to support a claim under the ATS. The complaint in Abecassis v. Wyatt alleges that various corporations and individuals purchased oil from Iraq and made...
"An ancient gold tablet, discovered during archaeological excavations in 1913 in the Ottoman Empire, disappeared from a Berlin museum in the immediate aftermath of World War II and reappeared almost sixty years later in the safe deposit box of a Holocaust survivor." So begins In re Flamenbaum, a case that reads like a Hollywood movie script. As reported here, "the...
Yesterday's oral argument in Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd gave strong indications that the Court was prepared to extend the territorial limitations of Hoffman-La Rouche v. Empagran to the securities fraud context. Morrison involves a class action brought by foreign plaintiffs against a foreign stock issuer on a foreign exchange for alleged fraud that occurred on foreign soil....
The Eleventh Circuit in United States v. Frank has ruled that a child sex trafficking statute applies extraterritorially. The statute, 18 U.S.C. § 2251A, provides that: “[w]hoever purchases ...
In the long-running battle between Chevron and Ecuador over environmental damage, a federal court in New York has denied Ecuador's motion to stay arbitration of a Ecuador-U.S. BIT claim. In September 2009, Chevron filed a notice of arbitration alleging, among other things, that "Ecuador has breached ...
