\u3cem\u3eYahoo!\u3c/em\u3e Cyber-Collision of Cultures: Who Regulates?

This Article furthers this comparison of cyberconflicts and the real world, attempting to ascertain what lessons, if any, can be drawn from it. Part I of the Article explores the interests at stake in cyberconflicts and the relationship between technology and the law. Part II uses the French Yahoo! court\u27s decision to show that real-world conceptions of prescriptive jurisdiction retain their legitimacy in cyberspace. Finally, Part III notes that the prospect of near perfect compliance offered by Internet technology provides the opportunity to engineer mature, well-calibrated solutions to international regulatory conflicts, which might then even serve as a model in the real world

Corporate Governance Sex Regimes: Peripheral Thoughts from Across the Atlantic

The very recent and highly mediatized “Declaration of the 343 Salauds”, where 343 (male) signatures in support of prostitution in a form designed to echo the highly significant declaration of as many women in 1971 in favor of the legalization of abortion, sheds particularly interesting light upon debate about sex regimes in connection with French law. France has recently introduced compulsory quotas for women in corporate boards after imposing la parité for public appointments. A comparative perspective, confronting this recent legislative development from across the Atlantic with policy views on affirmative action and philosophical conceptions of diversity in the United States, highlights the importance of the social, political or economic environment in which the issue of sex regimes arises as well as other forms of enforced diversity. Moreover, the way in which the issues are framed (how are the stakes for women presented? what about other minorities?) and the salience they have in the public space (who reacts? with what political support?) reveals a variety of cultural idiosyncrasies or paradoxes on each side. This short paper will start by sketching out some of these issues in the form of a general approach (I). It will then look more closely at some of the tensions and contradictions within contemporary French feminist thought: first through Bourdieu’s specific brand of social theory in La Domination Masculine (II), then in the writings of Elisabeth Badinter on X Y Identité Masculine (III)

Private International Law Beyond the Schism

The aim of this project is to explore the ways in which, in the absence of traditional forms of government in a global setting, the law can discipline the transnational exercise of private power by a variety of market actors (from rating agencies, technical standard-setters and multi-national agribusinesses to vulture funds). Traditionally, the cross-border economic activities of non-state actors fall within the remit of an area of the law known as 'private international law'. However, despite the contemporary juridification of international politics, private international law has contributed very little to the global governance debate, remaining remarkably silent before the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth and authority in the world. By abandoning such matters to its public international counterpart, it leaves largely untended the private causes of crisis and injustice affecting such areas as financial markets, environmental protection, pollution, the status of sovereign debt, the bartering (or confiscation) of natural resources and land, the use (and misuse) of development aid, (unequal) access to food, the status of migrant populations, and many more. On the other hand, public international law itself, on the tide of managerialism and fragmentation, is now increasingly confronted with conflicts articulated as collisions of jurisdiction and applicable law, among which private or hybrid authorities and regimes now occupy a significant place. According to the genealogy of private international law depicted here, the discipline has developed, under the aegis of the liberal divides between law and politics and between the public and the private spheres, a form of epistemological tunnel-vision, actively providing immunity and impunity to abusers of private sovereignty. It is now more than time to de-closet private international law and excavate the means with which, in its own right, it may impact upon the balance of informal power in the global economy. This means both quarrying the new potential of human rights in the transnational sphere, and rediscovering the specific savoir-faire acquired over many centuries in the recognition of alterity and the responsible management of pluralism. In short, adopting a planetary perspective means reaching beyond the schism between the public and private spheres and connecting up with the politics of international law

Conflicts of laws unbounded: the case for a legal-pluralist revival

This paper attempts to bring the specific insights of conflict of laws to issues challenging contemporary legal theory in its efforts to integrate the changes wrought by globalisation in the normative landscape beyond the nation-state. Indeed, conflicting norms and social systems are now at the centre-stage of jurisprudence. Conversely however, private international legal thinking can benefit from attention to the other legal disciplines that have preceded it in ‘going global’. It needs to undergo a conceptual overhauling in order to capture law’s novel foundations and features and adjust its epistemological and methodological tools to its transformed environment. It must reconsider the debate about legitimacy of political authority and the values that constitute its normative horizon. From this perspective, societal constitutionalism, as mooted by Teubner, provides a particularly promising avenue for unbounding the conflict of laws, which might then emerge as a form of de-centred, reflexive coordination of global legal interactions. [Abstract editor

Book review: Rights, Regulation, and the Technological Revolution

This monography provides an excellent synthesis of Roger Brownsword’s pio-neering scholarship at the interface of bio-technologies and regulation over the past decade (see, among many others, ‘What the World needs now: TechnoRegu-lation, Human Rights, and Human Dignity’, in R. Brownsword [ed], Human Rights [Oxford, Hart, 2004] 203; ‘Bioethics Today, Bioethics Tomorrow: Stem Cell Re-search and the Dignitarian Alliance’ 17 University of Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy 15, 2003; ‘Red Lights and Rogues: Regulating Human Genetics’, in H. Somsen [ed], The Regulatory Challenge of BioTechnology [Chelten-ham: Edward Elgar, 2007] 39). Although it is hardly in need of introduction in the English-speaking world, the editors of this Review have thought it important that attention should be drawn to this work, published in 2008, in continental European private law circles, where the prevalence of legal formalism means lesser familiarity with – and greater resistance to – the very concept of regulation and the various strategies by means of which human behavior can be channeled, including through the appropriate design of tools which may or may not be recognizable as ‘law’. Moreover, for similar reasons, issues of political philosophy rarely find their way through the mesh of legal technique, even in fields which engage issues of democracy, human dignity or the status of scientific knowledge to the extent that genetical engineering obviously does, particularly in a global market of ever-available technology. In this remarkable book, Roger Brownsword uses the lense of regulation to address the dilemma facing our complex societies as articulated by Habermas (The Future of Human Nature [Cambridge, Polity Press, 2003] 92): should normative foundations be dropped, in favour of bioge-netic steering mechanisms? [First paragraph

\u3cem\u3eYahoo!\u3c/em\u3e Cyber-Collision of Cultures: Who Regulates?

This Article furthers this comparison of cyberconflicts and the real world, attempting to ascertain what lessons, if any, can be drawn from it. Part I of the Article explores the interests at stake in cyberconflicts and the relationship between technology and the law. Part II uses the French Yahoo! court\u27s decision to show that real-world conceptions of prescriptive jurisdiction retain their legitimacy in cyberspace. Finally, Part III notes that the prospect of near perfect compliance offered by Internet technology provides the opportunity to engineer mature, well-calibrated solutions to international regulatory conflicts, which might then even serve as a model in the real world

The contested legitimacy of investment arbitration and the human rights ordeal

As attested by a growing body of literature1 and an increasing number of claims before arbitrators, the human rights ordeal now facing investment arbitration is the result of increasing unease generated by the contemporary quasi-­‐worldwide foreign investment regime (...)

La fonction économique du droit international privé

Au cœur des divers changements constitutifs du phénomène de la globalisation économique, l’impact du droit international privé a consisté à favoriser une inversion des relations traditionnelles entre l’autorité de l’État et l’autonomie des acteurs privés. Postulées pourtant par les fondements de cette discipline, qui se conçoit comme un droit d’allocation ou de distribution des rapports de droit (ou des litiges) entre des lois (ou des juges) étatiques en fonction de paramètres géographiques ou territoriaux pris comme indicateurs de la vocation normative des lois dans l’espace, ces relations révèlent désormais le pouvoir des acteurs de s’approprier les limites que prétendent leur imposer les États. La défaillance du droit étatique s’explique par le fait que son efficacité est pour une large part tributaire d’une vision du monde aujourd’hui dépassée. Il n’est plus en effet un instrument de régulation performant lorsqu’il définit son ressort selon des frontières qui n’existent plus pour les acteurs investis du pouvoir de les enjamber. Son autorité s’efface au profit de la volonté privée dans le champ même où il a facilité la privatisation des normes applicables en donnant aux acteurs privés les outils permettant de les mettre en concurrence. La clé de ce processus, qui atteint son paroxysme dans le champ contractuel, réside dans la place accordée par le droit international privé à l’autonomie des parties, tant dans le choix de la loi applicable que dans la détermination du juge compétent. Le modèle de gouvernance des relations économiques privées qui en résulte est d’ordre néo-libéral, les limites de droit public posées par les États étant privatisées et la production normative tributaire elle-même d’un marché global de services judiciaires. Cet article propose de retracer le rôle que le droit international privé a joué dans cette évolution, en présentant successivement la transformation de la fonction du principe d’autonomie, qui a favorisé le glissement du modèle libéral vers un modèle néo-libéral, et l’apparition concomitante d’un marché de services judiciaires ayant pour effet de réduire la production normative dans l’espace international, qui sont en réalité les deux faces d’un même phénomène

L''Alien Tort Statute' devant la Cour Suprême des Etats-Unis:Territorialité, diplomatie judiciaire, ou économie politique ?

1. C'est au nom de l'absence de portée « extraterritoriale » du Alien Tort Statute que la Cour Suprême des Etats-Unis vient de rejeter, à l'unanimité, la demande formée par Esther Kiobel (et d'autres membres du peuple Ogoni) contre Royal Dutch ShellNote de bas de page, au terme d'une bataille contentieuse longue et hautement médiatiséeNote de bas de page. D'autant plus attendu que le parcours procédural de cette affaire a été tortueux - depuis le surprenant jugement de la Cour fédérale d'appel du Second Circuit de 2010Note de bas de page jusqu'à la tournure inédite du débat dans la phase initiale de la procédure devant la Cour suprêmeNote de bas de page - l'arrêt comporte, finalement, peu de surprise tant en ce qui concerne le résultat concret obtenu. Il était devenu apparent depuis l'audience du 1er octobre 2012 que l'affaire était mal choisie pour obtenir l'avancée espérée de la jurisprudence sur le terrain de la discipline des multinationales dans leurs activités délocalisées ; les faits reprochés au conglomérat anglo-néerlandais avaient des liens trop ténus avec les Etats-Unis pour que la brèche voulue par la société civile soit enfin ouverte dans le protectionnisme économique national à la faveur de la protection globale des droits de l'homme. [Premier paragraphe

Editorial

Peer Reviewe