Document Type

Article

Publication Title

DePaul Law Review

Abstract

My perspective for this Symposium on American Civil Justice in a Global Context focuses on the differences between jurisdictional regimes in the United States and Europe. Those differences have been highlighted most recently through the lens of the negotiations at the Hague Conference on Private International Law in an attempt to arrive at a worldwide convention on international jurisdiction and the enforcement of judgments. While my Article compares contrasting approaches of the United States and Europe to judicial jurisdiction, the tensions about the proper scope of jurisdictional rules that came to a head in the Hague negotiations are really reflective of other aspects of American procedure that are discussed in some of the other articles in this Symposium. That is to say, much of the attack on American-style judicial jurisdiction is not really about jurisdiction at all, but about unhappiness with other aspects of civil litigation in the United States-juries, discovery, class actions, contingent fees, and often substantive American law, which is perceived as pro-plaintiff and selected under similar pro-plaintiff choice of law rules in U.S. courts. In the context of transnational litigation, of course, implementation of those unattractive (from the European perspective) features of American civil justice are achieved through assertion of judicial jurisdiction in U.S. courts, often over foreign country defendants. In the context of an initiative for a worldwide judgments convention, the Europeans perceived a "corrective mechanism" if they could obtain an international consensus on rules for asserting judicial jurisdiction, and thereby set limits on jurisdiction over foreign defendants by U.S. courts.

First Page

319

Volume

52

Publication Date

2002

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