A Proposed Lis Pendens Rule for Courts in the United States: The International Judgments Project of the American Law Institute
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Description
Like all of us writing in this festschrift for PETER NYGH, I had anticipated a joyous event in honor of the great legal and academic career of PETER NYGH. With PETER’s untimely death, the occasion is a different one, but one that has left us with even a clearer sense of the wonderful and unique contributions made by PETER. PETER’s understanding of both common and civil law traditions placed him in a position to suggest ways of bridging those different systems with creative international solutions. My own professional associations with PETER included service on our respective countries’ delegations (PETER, for Australia, me for the United States) on the Hague Special Commission that negotiated the 1996 Convention on the Protection of Children and on various Hague Special Commission meetings to review the Operation of the Hague International Child Abduction Convention. And although I was not a member of the U.S. delegation to the Hague Special Commission to negotiate an international jurisdiction and judgments Convention, in my role as Co-Reporter (with Professor Andreas Lowenfeld) on the American Law Institute’s International Jurisdiction and Judgments Project I was in close contact with the formal negotiators at The Hague, including Peter, and was kept abreast of those developments. While it now appears that a comprehensive international treaty on Jurisdiction and Judgments will not proceed at The Hague, PETER would be quite proud of the influence his work (along with co-rapporteur Fausto Pocar) has had and continues to have. There is optimism that the efforts to develop a more limited choice of court convention will go ahead at the Hague Conference; and such a treaty might serve as a first step to a more ambitious project in the future. And as I have written elsewhere, “one should not lose sight of the important lessons that have been learned from the experience and the insights gained in attempting to understand the wide gap that separates common law and civil law approaches [to issues of international jurisdiction and judgments].” A little closer to home, the Hague effort to negotiate a broad convention on jurisdiction and judgments with provisions for forum non conveniens and lis pendens has been a catalyst for a current project of the American Law Institute on enforcement of foreign judgments. Aspects of that project also represent a legacy from PETER NYGH. My tribute to PETER is divided into three sections: (1) a brief background for and description of the American Law Institute project (2) an account of how U.S. law presently deals with parallel proceedings in transnational litigation and (3) a discussion of the innovative lis pendens provision that appears in the ALI Tentative Draft—which takes inspiration from the lis pendens provision in the proposed Hague Convention Draft that itself reflects the influence of PETER NYGH.
Source Publication
Intercontinental Cooperation Through Private International Law: Essays in Memory of Peter E. Nygh
Source Editors/Authors
Talia Einhorn, Kurt Siehr
Publication Date
2004
Recommended Citation
Silberman, Linda J., "A Proposed Lis Pendens Rule for Courts in the United States: The International Judgments Project of the American Law Institute" (2004). Faculty Chapters. 1429.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1429
