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Dr Jacco Bomhoff 

This course is available on the LLM (extended part-time), LLM (full-time) and University of Pennsylvania Law School LLM Visiting Students. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course has a limited number of places and we cannot guarantee all students will get a place.

Knowledge of conflict of laws (private international law) would be useful but is not essential.

States often aim to regulate activities that transcend their own borders. When such measures are challenged or enforced through litigation, domestic courts become important sites of global governance. This course brings together perspectives from tort & company law, private international law (conflict of laws), public law, and regulation theory, to study such forms of extraterritorial and transnational regulation. Questions for discussion include: What law should a court in England apply to a case involving environmental damage allegedly caused abroad by a multinational mining company? Should companies operating in China ever be bound by US competition law rules or other US regulations? Should the UK Human Rights Act apply to actions by British soldiers in a foreign country? Topics to be studied throughout the course are: (1) Choice of law in tort law and in company law (especially in Europe and the US); (2) Extraterritorial application of statutes (incl. competition law, securities law, and environmental regulations); (3) extraterritorial application of constitutional- and human rights law; (4) theories of transnational regulation (e.g. institutional roles of courts, regulatory arbitrage).

20 hours of seminars in the Winter Term. Revision seminar in Spring Term.

There will be a reading week in week 6 of Winter Term.

All students are expected to produce one 1,800 word formative essay during the course.

Core textbook: Trevor C Hartley, International Commercial Litigation (Cambridge University Press, 3rd edn, 2020) (specified chapters only). Further reading: Christopher Whytock, Domestic Courts and Global Governance, 84 Tulane Law Review (2009); Campbell McLachlan, Foreign Relations Law (Cambridge University Press, 2016); Brilmayer, Goldsmith & O’Hara O’Connor, Conflict of Laws: Cases and Materials (7th edn., 2015).

Exam (100%, duration: 2 hours, reading time: 15 minutes) in the spring exam period.