Details
- Provides a general theory of jurisdiction in international law, the first overview to be published in twenty years
- Analysis cuts across controversial legal fields, including antitrust and criminal law, helping scholars and practitioners to devise underlying jurisdictional arguments in specific areas of law
- Presents a transatlantic perspective aiming to unify the approach to jurisdiction in the EU and US in transnational litigation
This book examines the international law of jurisdiction, focusing on the areas of law where jurisdiction is most contentious: criminal, antitrust, securities, discovery, and international humanitarian and human rights law. Since F.A. Mann's work in the 1980s, no analytical overview has been attempted of this crucial topic in international law: prescribing the admissible geographical reach of a State's laws.
The need for such an overview has grown more pressing in recent years as the traditional framework of the law of jurisdiction, grounded in the principles of sovereignty and territoriality, has been undermined by piecemeal developments. Antitrust jurisdiction is heading in new directions, influenced by law and economics approaches; new EC rules are reshaping jurisdiction in securities law; the U.S. is arguably overreaching in the field of corporate governance law; and the universality principle has gained ground in European criminal law and U.S. tort law.
Such developments have given rise to conflicts over competency that struggle to be resolved within traditional jurisdiction theory. This study proposes an innovative approach that departs from the classical solutions and advocates a general principle of international subsidiary jurisdiction. Under the new proposed rule, States would be entitled, and at times even obliged, to exercise subsidiary jurisdiction over internationally relevant situations, in the interest of the international community, if the State having primary jurisdiction fails to assume its responsibility.
Readership: Academics, advanced students and practitioners working on public international, private international, criminal, human rights or antitrust law
- Contents:
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Public International Law Approaches to Jurisdiction
- 3. The Territoriality Principle
- 4. The Principles of Extraterritorial Criminal Jurisdiction
- 5. The Jurisdictional Rule of Reason
- 6. General Overview of Practice Trends
- 7. A New Perspective on the International Law of Jurisdiction
Cedric Ryngaert, Lecturer in international law, Catholic University of Leuven, and University of Utrecht
"This ambitious book, based on Cedric Ryngaert's PhD at Leuven University, does not disappoint. Its aim is nothing less than a comprehensive analysis of the admissible geographical reach of State legislative power...this remarkably concise volume is a gem bound to become a reference on prescriptive jurisdiction in International law" - Michael Waibel, ICLQ, Vol 58
"...a welcome and timely piece of scholarship, especially as a comprehensive examination of State jurisdiction appears to have been previously attempted over two decades ago...The book at hand doubtlessly succeeds in challenging the reader's views about the way in which international law deals with the exercise of state jurisdiction. Ryngaert's plan for revision is ambitious and thought-provoking, though not without difficulties" - Rain Liivoja, Finnish Yearbook of International Law
