Linguistic Legislation and Transnational Commercial Activity: France & Belgium

For French and francophonic people, the continued vitality of their linguistic heritage is an integral part of their sense of national identity and cultural cohesiveness. The truth of this statement has been corroborated recently by legislative enactments in France and in Belgium which prescribe and/or recommend the use of French in certain private commercial and governmental activity taking place within these countries. This legislation represents an attempt to provide a partial remedy to what has been perceived generally as the syntactical and lexical contamination of the French language resulting from the dominance of English or, more precisely, American English, in international business transactions and technological development. Born of a common desire to protect the integrity of the French language, the provisions of the two legislative instruments are similar in many respects: the earlier French law in fact served as a model for the Belgian decree. They raise the same issues, albeit to differing degrees; namely, the wisdom of modifying linguistic usage through legislative means; the practicality of enforcing a broad, perhaps ill-defined, mandate; and the propriety of having their substantive prescriptions interpreted and applied by the courts.The purpose of this article is to assess legislation which attempts to regulate the use of language by measuring the consequences of these enactments on transnational commercial matters. Since the Belgian decree relies heavily upon the precedent set by the French law and is a less drastic measure, the provisions of the French statute constitute the principal focus of this study

Introduction: The Internationalization of Law and Legal Practice

The Eason-Weinmann Colloquium entitled The Internationalization of Law and Legal Practice, held in March 1988, addressed the challenges posed to conventional legal practice and rules of law by the evolution of the international marketplace. In light of the increasingly international character of commercial transactions, could or should disputes in transnational business ventures be adjudicated exclusively within national processes and according to domestic strictures? Does the character of these transactions portend the creation of a new genre of lawyering? Are current academic curricula adapted to the molding of this new breed of lawyers? Is a functional international bar possible? Do we need a substantive law of wide jurisdictional dimensions that fits the contours of transnational commercial conduct? How would such a law emerge? What would be its source of legitimacy?How can it be enforced

A Comment on the 1996 United Kingdom Arbitration Act

The 1996 United Kingdom Arbitration Act is a remarkable piece of legislation. It is a highly accessible statutory framework both from a linguistic and organizational standpoint. The 1996 Act represents a substantial improvement over prior English arbitration statutes,including the 1979 Act. The new legislation is comprehensive, thorough, cogent and coherent. In its presentation and content, it easily rivals both longstanding and recentlegislative enactments on arbitration. It is built upon a wealth of knowledge and expertise of arbitration law and practice, and embodies a very contemporary and integrated concept of arbitration. This commentary endeavors to highlight and appraise the most significant aspects of the1996 Act

The Reception of Arbitration in United States Law

The willingness of any national legal system to endorse the process of arbitral adjudication can be measured by whether its governing statutory law and accompanying case law sustain the validity of arbitration agreements and limit judicial supervision of arbitral proceedings and awards - in effect, whether the laws of a nation establish a cooperative relationship between the courts and the arbitral process. On both scores, United States law on arbitration evinces a clear determination to support the process. The development of the law has given the framework of arbitral adjudication its necessary systemic autonomy

Building the Civilization of Arbitration - Introduction

The U.S. Supreme Court\u27s work product has generated a large and growing arbitration bar. It also has finally begun to stimulate a greater volume of academic activity on the topic of arbitration. The work of legal practitioners and academics,along with the courts\u27 decisional law, are Building a Civilization of Arbitration that codifies advances and grapples with the controversial aspects of law-in-the making.The Penn State Dickinson School of Law takes great pride in welcoming a distinguished group of lawyers and law teachers to the pages of its Law Review.They are the leaders in the field of arbitration. Their contributions identify the settled law and evaluate it from a variety of analytical, intellectual, and institutional perspectives. The symposium investigates a wide variety of cutting-edge topics, ranging from recent landmark cases to investment arbitration and including the reform of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA), the concept of private ordering in international commercial arbitration (ICA), empirical developments in consumer arbitration,third-party interests in arbitration, various provocative comparative law developments-the role of courts in national arbitration laws, a lucid evaluation of the Russian Federation\u27s statist concept of arbitration, an equally insightful comparison of Canadian and United States consumer arbitration, and an evaluation of an important recent book on ICA

Building the Civilization of Arbitration - Introduction

The U.S. Supreme Court\u27s work product has generated a large and growing arbitration bar. It also has finally begun to stimulate a greater volume of academic activity on the topic of arbitration. The work of legal practitioners and academics,along with the courts\u27 decisional law, are Building a Civilization of Arbitration that codifies advances and grapples with the controversial aspects of law-in-the making.The Penn State Dickinson School of Law takes great pride in welcoming a distinguished group of lawyers and law teachers to the pages of its Law Review.They are the leaders in the field of arbitration. Their contributions identify the settled law and evaluate it from a variety of analytical, intellectual, and institutional perspectives. The symposium investigates a wide variety of cutting-edge topics, ranging from recent landmark cases to investment arbitration and including the reform of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA), the concept of private ordering in international commercial arbitration (ICA), empirical developments in consumer arbitration,third-party interests in arbitration, various provocative comparative law developments-the role of courts in national arbitration laws, a lucid evaluation of the Russian Federation\u27s statist concept of arbitration, an equally insightful comparison of Canadian and United States consumer arbitration, and an evaluation of an important recent book on ICA

The French Legal Studies Curriculum: Its History and Relevance as a Model for Reform

This article attempts to describe and analyze those events which fostered the historical metamorphosis of the French legal studies curriculum. The predominance of a broad academic approach to law and the concomitant absence of a narrow trade school mentality in the French law schools might be attributed to the general organization of higher education in France. One of the primary contentions of this article is that the fundamental character of French legal education, which emphasizes the educating of jurists as opposed to the training of lawyers, is the product of a set of factors which are deeply rooted in French history and are part of the basic intellectual assumptions of French culture. It is the basic thesis of this paper that the French legal studies program provides a model for the long-overdue reform of North American legal education

The Implicit Teaching of Utopian Speculations: Rousseau\u27s Contribution to the Natural Law Tradition

Legal philosophers, especially of the positivist variety, traditionally have assumed that the proponents of natural law theory present too facile an answer to the vexed question of whether an unjust law can be said to exist when it is duly sanctioned by legal and political authority. If not disappointed by the answer itself, they have been most unhappy with the explanation that accompanies it and, indeed, are prepared to challenge the very foundations of a theory of law which pays so little heed—either empirically or in terms of pure logic—to the actual operations of existing legal systems. Kant initiated the rebellion against the law–morality equation by distinguishing them as two separate spheres of activity.) Subsequent philosophers, thanks to the analogy between legal rules and the rules of a game, inaugurated the movement towards the purely systemic analysis of law

Transnational Law-Making: Assessing the Impact of the Vienna Convention and the Viability of Arbitral Adjudication

Questions concerning the future orientation of the process are more pressing and demand a definition of the international mission and role of arbitral adjudication. Nations share the perception that national economies are no longer autonomous, that they must function within a larger global framework. The question then becomes not whether a uniform international law of sales is needed, but rather how it is to be achieved. The transnational preeminence that arbitration has gained as a remedial mechanism makes it a likely vehicle for elaborating a common law of international contracts. This article assesses the impact of the Vienna Convention upon prospective and actual transnational arbitral law-making, and concludes that, given the realities of international commerce, having arbitral awards rendered by way of published decisions with reasons remains the more viable source of an emerging common law of international contracts. At best, in light of its substantive deficiencies and its political underpinnings, the Convention can only serve a veiled function, acting as a remote backdrop for arbitral rulings that actually create viable rules of conduct for international merchants