The Sixth Hague Joint Conference on Contemporary Issues of International Law was held in the grandeur of the beautiful Kurhaus Hotel from 3 to 5 July 2003. The Hague Joint Conference is organized by the American Society of International Law, the Netherlands International Law Association and the T.M.C. Asser Institute and takes place every two years. This year, the theme of the Conference was ‘From Government to Governance? The Growing Impact of Non-State Actors on the International and European Legal System’. This subject was further explored in three parallel seminars entitled ‘International Organizations and Good Governance’, ‘Multinational Business and Corporate Governance’ and ‘Responding to International Terrorism’. This report presents some impressions of the Conference to the readers of this journal.

The privatization of the rail network, which started in 1996, is the main motivation for this analysis of the recent performance of and prospects for the sector. The paper starts with a brief description of the evolution of the Brazilian transport sector and its relationship with the country's economic development. The second section presents an overview of the size and relative importance of the transport sector by mode, and the characteristics of intermodal competition. The operational and cost structure of the rail sector is then analyzed in detail and compared to its tariffs. The limited cash flow generation of the rail concessionaires is set against the investment needs of the sector for service expansion. The conclusions drawn from the financial performance analysis prompt a discussion of the prospects for the Brazilian rail sector.

Given that there are a number of incentives for antitrust plaintiffs to sue in English courts, English jurisdictional decisions in such actions are of far-reaching importance for the future of private antitrust enforcement in the European Community. In Provimi, the High Court of England and Wales recently handed down one of the first judgments in Europe regarding the vitamins cartels and asserted its jurisdiction. The question before the High Court was whether vitamins purchasers have an arguable claim against a subsidiary of a cartelised manufacturer, where the subsidiary implemented the cartel without knowledge of the price-fixing agreement, and whether such a claim could arise even if there was no contractual relationship between the purchasers and the subsidiary in question. The High Court held that there was an arguable claim and that it had jurisdiction to hear claims against non-English subsidiaries as long as one of the subsidiaries was domiciled in the United Kingdom. This case note argues that the High Court was right to assume that there was an arguable claim, but that its reasoning is deficient. Invoking the European law principle of effectiveness, it argues in favour of easing or reversing the burden of proof for particular facts in private antitrust litigation. This case note also takes issue with the interpretation of certain jurisdictional agreements in the decision, which – if construed correctly – would have barred the High Court from finding that it had jurisdiction in respect of some of the claims.

This case note comments on three important judgments delivered by the Court of Justice of the European Communities (full court) on 4 June 2002, concerning restrictions on the acquisition of shares in companies in Portugal (Case C-367/97), France (Case C-483/99) and Belgium (Case C-503/99) in relation to the free movement of capital guaranteed by the EC Treaty. In doing so, it analyses these judgments from two angles. First, it scrutinises the legal reasoning of the Court, particularly with regard to the recognition of the free movement of capital as a fully-fledged freedom and the relationship between capital movements and the freedom of establishment. Second, it considers the practical consequences of the judgments for Member States. While noting some minor problems of interpretation in relation to the judgments, this case note assesses whether the Member States retain some control over the acquisition of share capital in strategic companies.

This article analyses three decisions of the German Federal High Court concerning the German country-code top-level domain ‘.de’ – mitwohnzentrale.de, shell.de and vossius.de. The analysis shows that the Court referred to economic criteria to justify its decisions in this field of law which is barely regulated by statutory law. The questions whether generic terms should be allocated to private persons as domain names (mitwohnzentrale.de) and whether courts should transfer domain names in the case of a conflict between two rightholders to the same domain name (shell.de and vossius.de) are analysed on the basis of economic criteria. The economic analysis of the first question offers two efficient solutions: (1) owners of generic domain names should be obliged to provide links to the websites of their competitors or (2) generic domain names should be administered by the official registrar, which should provide a portal for the whole branch of industry in question. The answer to the second question is that courts should engage in the transfer of domain names only in cases where bargaining between the parties fails due to a situation of bilateral monopoly with asymmetric information. If the courts decide to transfer a domain name, the original owner must be entitled to receive appropriate compensation.

EC Securities Regulation is the sixteenth title in the Oxford EC Law Library, a series that consists of studies of the various branches of EC law. This book is destined to become a benchmark in its field. This is not only due to the considerable number of documents it analyzes, which might be intimidating at first, but also to the fact that the more one reads, the more one is impressed by the quality and thoroughness of the analysis. This is even more remarkable when one considers the complexity of the subject.