RoR: Forum

Post 0

Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - 11:39am

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Since 1893, the Hague Conference on Private International Law, a melting pot of different legal traditions, develops and services Conventions which respond to global needs in the following areas:
International Protection of Children
International Protection of Adults
Relations between (Former) Spouses
Wills, Trusts and Estates
International Judicial and Administrative Co-operation
Jurisdiction and Enforcement of Judgments
Contracts
Torts
Securities
Trusts
Recognition of Companies
http://www.hcch.net/

Post 1

Sunday, April 2, 2006 - 7:15pm

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Private International Law or just Private Law under the heading "conflict of laws." In fact, here in the USA, the "full faith and credit" clause of the Constitution does not much for gay marriage (so-called) or most other unlawful marriages, as when the age of majority was different for men and for women and was 21 or 18 depending. We here in the USA do not perceive the substrate of 50 "competing governments" that seems to hold together. Federalism is a thin frame. Something else is at work.

In Europe, however, the reality of a couple dozen nations has always been something to live with, even when putative "nations" such as "Germany" and "Italy" were only shells surrounding a dozen or more polities.

In the USA, the state of Lousiana still has a basis of Codex Napoleon within its laws and therein are THREE "books." The criminal law we all would understand. Even the civil law of torts is the governmentalist solution to past problems that we accept as unquestioned. However, Codex Napoleon had a "third book" -- Obligations, i.e, "business law" or "contract law."

In German common law there was a separate "book" on the many ways that a thing could be "owned" i.e., title to it bought or sold, insured, mortgaged, etc., etc., etc.

All of this has always existed since the days of Rome when the problems of "law" became more complicated than the commands of the ruling body. In Rome, they had to deal with the problems of an Alexandrian merchant selling grain from Britain to a town council in Greece. We fail to understand what it meant that Trajan was born in Spain. We think of him as a "Roman" emperor. Roman law may or may not have extended that far -- and one of the innovations of Roman law was that it superseded custom.

Few people ever read the BACKS of forms. You buy something. You issue a purchase order. The seller issues a bill of sale. The terms on those two documents may be quite different, even conflicting. Those two parties expect shipment to take place without actually reading the terms on the back of a bill of lading -- or trying to reconcile them. Yet, trade and commerce flow.

Post 2

Sunday, February 3 - 1:00pm

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All choice-of-law cases pose essentially the same problem: several rules or sets of rules, also called legal systems purport to govern disputed issues or set of issues, also called legal relationship, at stake. Traditionally, continental private international law (P.I.L.) focuses on the legal relationship and connects it to the appropriate legal system by means of choice-of-law rules.

Lois de police and modern American theories have common grounds despite any mutual influence. Both theories attempt to solve the choice of law problem from a functional standpoint. Basically, a functional approach to choice-of-law process centers on the policies that underlie the competing rules through a two-step inquiry.

Guedj Thomas G., �The Theory of the Lois de Police, A Functional Trend in Continental Private International Law-A Comparative Analysis with Modern American Theories,� The American Journal of Comparative Law, Vol. 39, No. 4. (Autumn, 1991), pp. 661-697.

The study of private settlement of cross-border trade and investment disputes through international commercial arbitration or other mechanisms has been much neglected by scholars of international political economy and international institutions. This oversight is attributable in part to the traditional focus of international relations on intergovernmental international organizations and the lack of attention to private international institutional arrangements. A further reason for the oversight is that arbitration is resolutely private, making information exceedingly difficult to obtain. Two distinguished international arbitrators, Alan Redfern and Martin Hunter, recently observed that the study of the practice of international commercial arbitration is like peering into the dark. Few arbitral awards are published and even fewer procedural decisions of arbitral tribunals come to light.

Private Justice in a Global Economy: From Litigation to Arbitration

Walter Mattli, International Organization, Vol. 55, No. 4, The Rational Design of International Institutions. (Autumn, 2001), pp. 919-947.

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 2/03, 1:12pm)

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