Category Archives: Conflict of Laws
Lukas Rass-Masson, ‘The Impact of European Private International Law and the réserve héréditaire in France’
ABSTRACT Whether the réserve héréditaire (forced heirship under French inheritance law) forms part of French international ordre public, and therefore falls within the public-policy exception, has long been the subject of a major doctrinal debate in France. While the traditional answer was positive, the contemporary evolution of French private international law, driven in particular by […]
Marco Pasqua, ‘Adapting Private International Law to Anti-SLAPP Litigation: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow’
ABSTRACT Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) are legal actions – most commonly based on defamation, privacy or related claims – brought not to genuinely assert or protect a right, but to prevent, restrict or penalise public participation. They are typically characterised by an imbalance of power between the parties, the use of procedural tactics […]
Luís de Lima Pinheiro, ‘Law Applicable to International AI Torts, A Note on a Forthcoming Contribution’
ABSTRACT This note summarizes the analysis, key insights and proposals advanced in the contribution ‘Law Applicable to International AI Torts: An Introduction’, forthcoming in Memorial Publication in Honour of Prof Dr Dr hc mult Erik Jayme, ed by Martin Gebauer and Heinz-Peter Mansel, Verlag Gieseking, Bielefeld, to be published in May 2027. The choice of […]
‘Safari Choice-of-Law Clauses’
In June 2026, I went on a safari in Tanzania with my family. We went on a hot air balloon ride over the Serengeti, visited a Masai village, and saw all of the Big Five. Before we embarked on these adventures, we were asked to sign an Assumption of Risk, Waiver of Liability, and Indemnification […]
‘The CJEU Anne Frank judgment and its broader implications (including for the internet and, obviously, AI too)’
A few days ago, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued its judgment in Anne Frank, C-788/24, a referral from the Netherlands concerning the right of communication to the public under Article 3(1) of the InfoSoc Directive and liability for the online publication of a work – The Diary of Anne Frank […]
‘Copyright, Targeting and Geo-Blocking: The CJEU Stirs the Pot’
The CJEU’s recent copyright decision in Anne Frank endorses state of the art geo-blocking as an effective way of shielding a website from the different copyright laws of another EU Member State. Although the result on the facts is welcome, the potential implications of the Court’s underlying reasoning are less so. At a principled level, […]
‘Private International Law and European Society’
Can one speak of a European society without speaking about private relations? Recent scholarship on European society has largely approached the concept through the lens of public law. Yet societies are constituted at least as much by the horizontal relations between individuals and groups as by public institutions. In the absence of a comprehensive European […]
Matthias Weller, ‘Mutual Trust’
ABSTRACT ‘Mutual trust’ has advanced to one of the most fundamental principles of judicial cooperation in civil and commercial matters and as such of both European civil procedural law and European private international law. In a first step after the Treaty of Amsterdam 1999 mutual trust has established itself as an explanatory and interpretative principle […]
‘Modernizing Foreign Judgments Law’
In 1895, the Supreme Court decided Hilton v Guyot, the foundational case on foreign judgments law. The underlying lawsuit was straightforward. Two American entrepreneurs were sued in Paris by their French business associates in connection with a commercial dispute that occurred in France. When the plaintiffs prevailed, they brought their French money judgment to US […]
Panagiota Kotzaman, ‘Parent liability after Mariana v BHP: control, vigilance, and the need for structural reform’
The MARIANA case On 14 November 2025, the High Court of England and Wales handed down judgment in the largest environmental mass tort in UK history: the group claim by more than 600,000 Brazilian victims of the 2015 collapse of the Fundão tailings dam against the mining giant BHP Group. In Município de Mariana v […]