Three
ALI Projects Are Focus
of Important
Meetings in Europe
The internationalization of the Institute’s work continues to expand. In June, three different projects were the subject of intellectually challenging discussion in Europe. In Berlin, experts on insolvency from all over the world gathered to consider coordination rules for insolvencies affecting more than one country. In Tuscany, judges, lawyers, and professors from many European countries and the United States met to compare American and fast-changing European legal rules and principles for aggregation of litigation when a dispute has the same or a similar effect on a large number of parties. In Geneva, the latest in a series of meetings on the Institute’s project on Principles of World Trade Law was held to discuss drafts of articles analyzing recent decisions by the judicial arm of the World Trade Organization.
Transnational Insolvency. The latest meeting in this project, a joint effort between ALI and the International Insolvency Institute (III), was held at Humboldt University in Berlin on June 11. Judges, practitioners, and academics from more than eight countries, including Brazil, England, Italy, and Norway, participated in this third meeting of the project’s International Advisers, Members Consultative Group, and III Working Group. The project’s goal is to disseminate and extend the work from ALI’s Transnational Insolvency: Principles of Cooperation Among the NAFTA Countries, which was published in 2003. Professors Ian Fletcher of University College London and Bob Wessels of the University of Leiden in The Netherlands led a discussion of their drafts on behalf of the ALI-III project, which at this point includes work on general principles, conflict-of-law principles, and guidelines for court-to-court communications in cross-border cases.
The Reporters’ research on the acceptability of the guidelines for court-to-court communications has found that there is general support for the guidelines outside of the NAFTA countries, subject to several key problem areas. These include prohibitions on communications in existing domestic law and the limited roles of courts and judges in insolvency proceedings in civil-law countries.
Several judges at the meeting also participated in a meeting of American and European judges and the German Ministry of Justice, where they discussed, among other things, the judges’ views on the permissibility of transnational court-to-court communications. Their discussion supported the Reporters’ findings: For example, a provision of the German constitution prohibits communications between courts of different nations, and judges could be personally liable if they agree to protocols for cooperation; however, nonjudicial insolvency administrators in Germany may be permitted to communicate with other courts and approve protocols.
Aggregate Litigation. About 55 participants, including leading academics and lawyers from France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, as well as judges from the United States and Italy, gathered on June 13 and 14 at Villa La Pietra, New York University’s Conference Center near Florence, for a conference on class actions and aggregate procedures in Europe. The attendees included several persons responsible for drafting statutes or rules as well as primary law-reform proponents. The meeting, cosponsored by NYU School of Law, ALI, and the European University Institute, included presentations on the ALI’s project on the Principles of the Law of Aggregate Litigation by each of the project’s Reporters: Samuel Issacharoff of NYU, Robert Klonoff, dean of Lewis and Clark Law School, Richard Nagareda of Vanderbilt, and Charles Silver of the University of Texas.
According to ALI Reporter and conference co-organizer Sam Issacharoff, the conference could not have been more timely: Italy’s new class-action statute came into force on July 1; the Netherlands has an untested class-action settlement procedure, generating great interest in the recommendations in Chapter 3 of the ALI’s Principles project; and Germany is going through its first mass action on securities fraud in the Deutsche Telekom case, in which 17,000 shareholders are suing the former state telecoms monopoly seeking compensation for the slump in its share price.
World Trade Law. On June 17, economist Henrik Horn of the Research Institute of Industrial Economics, Stockholm, and Petros Mavroidis of Columbia Law School and the University of Neuchatel, Chief Co-Reporters of the ALI project on Principles of World Trade Law, organized a conference at the WTO building in Geneva on the WTO case law for the years 2006 and 2007.
Among the case analyses presented were the GMO (genetically modified organisms) dispute between the European Community and the United States, which was coauthored by Henrik Horn and Robert Howse and discussed by Joseph Weiler, the latter two of NYU Law School; and the antidumping “zeroing” litigation between the United States on the one hand and the EC and Japan on the other, coauthored by economist Tom Prusa of Rutgers University and Brussels lawyer Edwin Vermulst. Other prominent economists and lawyers from the United States and Europe participated in the meeting, and key WTO officials and staffers also attended. The papers from this conference will be revised for publication next spring as the fifth book of case analyses produced in the ALI project. The fourth book, covering WTO case law of 2004 and 2005, will be published in August by Cambridge University Press, which also recently published ALI’s The Genesis of the GATT by Professors Mavroidis, Douglas Irwin of Dartmouth College, and Alan Sykes of Stanford Law School.