News

Each country shapes its family law to a great extent in accordance with the traditions, customs and religious values inherently dominant in its own country. Therefore, what is usual and natural in one jurisdiction could be regarded as a strange practice in another. Religious marriages and divorces are typical examples of institutions which can be perceived in a multitude of different ways due to cultural particularities. Thus, conflicts arise between the laws of countries with different legal philosophies and cultural traditions. The difficulties become greatest when the conflict is between the laws of countries without any common legal or cultural tradition. Prof. Dr. Ekşi will discuss the following essential question: to what extent are religious marriages such as polygamous marriages, proxy marriages, muta marriages, arranged and forced marriages recognized as valid in private international law. Prof. Dr. Ekşi will also focus on the recognition of administrative and religious divorces which is another extremely difficult issue to reach a proper conclusion for. It will also be discussed in a comparative manner whether divorce by a letter of the husband or talaq…

Some ten years ago Austria and Germany have adopted corporate governance codes. These codes were modelled after the English corporate governance code. The two codes and rules of corporate law based on these codes have become firmly established in the Austrian and German legal system. They have been absorbed into the national jurisdiction.

The presentation will examine the effect these transplants have had on Austrian and German law. Has the adoption of English corporate law rules led to convergence? Have the rules changed as a result of the transplantation? To what extent has Austrian and German law interpreted the transplanted rules in light of their origin?

…

One constitutes oneself as a comparatist by rejecting the fixity of conceptually homogenized understandings and by marking a third location that is neither one nor the other but, disputing the territories of both, something else besides. For the comparatist-at-law, the third space is distinguishable from the laws being compared (it is neither outside or astride those laws) while not being reducible to a composite of the pre-existing laws. In the third space, there takes place a re-articulation projecting meaning beyond any signification obtaining in the situated laws. As it displaces them, the third space can properly be regarded as effectuating an othering of those laws. The third space introduces another other to the comparison-at-law (when it comes to comparison, one plus one makes three). Indeed, emerging beyond any antecedent information, beyond any ”either/or” or ”both/and” scenario, the third space offers a space of contestation and transaction disrupting each law’s assumed totalization, a translational space where meanings are dismantled or deconstructed, but also acts as a powerful site of reconstitution and meaning productivity. In the third space, new knowledge is fabricated….

The non-retroactivity of crimes and punishments has become a rule of customary international law. How it did so is an interesting and complex story about the use of comparative law in the making of international law.

This rule of international human rights law can be demonstrated as rigorously from practice and opinio juris as any other rule of customary international law. It is sometimes said that less evidence of state practice is necessary to treat an international human right as customary international law. Rules of human rights law, however, are far safer and more secure if grounded in practice as well as opinio juris. Legality is an excellent tool for making such a demonstration of technique in human rights law.

Because legality, as with other human rights, concerns the relationship between states and their own nationals, not just states and others’ nationals, a wider variety of practice sources needs to be considered than is often used in deal with evidence of customary international law that concerns only state interactions with each other. In addition, the practice and opinio juris of international organizations,…

As the result of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, new independent states were formed on European territory: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine. This served as an impetus to extensive law reforms in these countries. Family law reform was a constituent part of this revision. It had to be adapted to the new social and economic realities, which were brought to these countries together with tremendous political changes. In the former USSR, the Soviet republics did not have a lot of freedom in designing their own family laws; all the codes on marriage and the family were practically the same, being based on the Fundamentals of the Legislation of the USSR and Soviet Republics on Marriage and the Family and having, in fact, the Russian Federation (at that time RSFSR) Code on Marriage and the Family 1969 as a common compulsory model. Therefore it is not surprising that after these countries became independent and were released from the pressure of the Soviet state, a completely different picture of family law emerged.

The lecture…

This lecture addresses the recognition of same-sex marriage in both private international law and interstate Full Faith and Credit and conflict of laws principles.

It will compare the American position under the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) with the approach followed in other jurisdictions.

It will review the American concept of federalism in marriage regulation, and it will consider the relevance for interjurisdictional marriage recognition of the significance of the meaning of marriage.

…

Contemporary accounts of corporate legal evolution view lawmakers as highly responsive to the economic interests of both pressure groups and markets. Through this lens law is understood to be the product of pressures exerted by managers, investors, institutional shareholders and the Federal Government, and the incentives of state lawmakers to accommodate the interests of these pressure groups. This view dominates the current understanding of corporate legal evolution in the United States and is becoming highly influential in comparative accounts of corporate legal variation.

This lecture sounds a note of objection: it argues that the disciplinary pendulum has swung too far toward external accounts of legal evolution and too far away from internal accounts of legal change, which view the path of law, at least in part, as the product of the internally generated constraints of the legal system. Contrary to the dominant account of the evolution of self-dealing law in the United States, the contemporary self-dealing rule is not the unexplained product of external market pressures but is the logical product of the path of fiduciary law trodden through the corporate…

In the post-industrial era ever more goods, services, persons and capital cross national borders. Business organizations – companies, corporate groups and state-owned enterprises – “enter” and “exit” states offering goods and services according to their business needs. Each of these requires coordination of the legal systems in which the various activities take place, in order to inspire confidence that an activity undertaken in the territory of one country will not be frustrated in another.

The presentation will explore the coordinating role of private international law, on an international level as well as within each national system. The legislature has to take account of cross-border effects of its legislation also when enacting statutes that, on their face, seem to concern purely domestic matters. Private international law provides courts with tools that enable coordination even in the absence of legislation, such as the preliminary question, renvoi, and the application of economic conflict-of-law rules. Occasionally, there may be need to coordinate results obtained under religious law and secular law. In certain matters there is need for coordination on an administrative and regulatory level. Finally,…

Law transfers often have not been successful because they didn’t fit with the local legal culture. Of course, such local legal cultures may be stronger in some areas, such as family law, than in others,such as air traffic regulation.

In my lecture I will study the effect of legal transfers from Europe to Africa in the area of family law, as this is the area of law which is generally considered to be the most closely linked with local cultures. Examples will be drawn from several African countries, with an emphasis on Nigerian law.

…

Further to providing a picture of the international recovery of child support before the 2007 Hague Child Support Convention and presenting an overview of the 2007 Hague Child Support Convention, Mr. Lortie will highlight the practical challenges in this area of the law such as the increasing number of divorces and the resulting number of child support cases, the budget crises experienced by many States and the role of States in providing welfare, social security payments in lieu of the child support that should normally be provided by the parents.

Against this background, Mr. Lortie will present opportunities for domestic law reforms in relation to the recovery of child support with respect to matters such as: effective access to procedures (e.g., administrative versus court-based systems); the location of the debtor; the establishment of parentage; the determination of the amount of maintenance to be paid; the swift recognition, enforceability and effective enforcement of decisions; information technology; and, questions of applicable law.

…