This article discusses the United Kingdom Supreme Court judgment in Zubaydah v Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, which addressed the law governing the tort liability of the United Kingdom Government for its alleged complicity in the claimant's arbitrary detention and torture overseas by the Central Intelligence Agency. In holding that English law applied, the Court departed from previous case law by giving decisive weight to public law factors in its choice-of-law reasoning. This decision arguably heralds a greater role for English law in relation to tort claims brought by overseas victims of allegedly wrongful exercises of British executive authority as a mechanism for achieving executive accountability, controlling abuse of power, ensuring the rule of law and providing victims access to remedy.

This article argues that the purpose of the English gateways for service out of the jurisdiction is to identify a presumptive meaningful connection; that courts have used different mechanisms to rebut the presumption of a meaningful connection established by the gateways; and that there are lessons to be learnt from a clearer, more explicit understanding of this presumptive purpose of the gateways. The article uses Brownlie (I and II) and Fong v Ascentic Ltd to support and illustrate these arguments.

On 7 December 2022, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a treaty known as the Beijing Convention governing the recognition abroad of the international effects of judicial sales of ships. This article explores the rationale for a specific Convention on this issue, and its interaction with other relevant international conventions. It then analyses the recognition approach adopted by the Convention and evaluates its potential strengths and weaknesses. While some provisions might need further consideration, the overall conclusion is that the Beijing Convention has the potential to strengthen the legal certainty of the purchaser's title obtained via this sale mechanism and thus help debt recovery. Although common law jurisdictions might find it at odds with some of their features, the expected benefits from ratifying it seem to outweigh these issues and are already prompting a steady number of signatures, including those of China, the European Union and Singapore.

Cross-border contracts often contain a clause which purports to reflect the parties’ intention regarding how disputes arising from their agreement should be resolved. Some such contracts might feature a “jurisdiction clause”, thus signifying the parties’ wish to subject their disputes to litigation before the courts in a specific state. Others may include an “arbitration clause”, meaning that claims arising from the contract should be subjected to an arbitral hearing. More unusual are cases in which the parties have included a jurisdiction and an arbitration clause in the same cross-border contract. This article seeks to assess English law’s approach to determining the parties’ preferred mode of dispute resolution in these more difficult cases. As it seeks to demonstrate, the current practice in this area is not always easy to defend. The article advances an alternative basis for determining which of the two competing clauses should prevail.

Marine war risk insurance fundamentally contemplates casualties caused by international conflict. Curiously, however, standard clauses also exclude cover and automatically terminate war risk policies in the event of an outbreak of war between a select group of historically powerful States: China, France, the United Kingdom, the United States and Russia. This article aims to demystify the origins of this five-powers clause and evaluate its prospective application through the lens of an emerging breed of confrontation among the world's major powers.

This article offers a reconstruction of how the Court of Justice of the European Union (EU) justifies the territorial scope of application of EU law. Scholarship on this issue tends to advocate for an expansive projection of EU norms in the pursuit of global values, subject to the external limits of public international law. This article will develop a critique of this approach by pointing to its underlying assumptions as to the territorial dimension of the EU's rule, the insoluble practical issues that it leads to, and the need to consider differently the EU's spatial identity and relation to the wider world. It will also be argued that, in fact, other case law sometimes already reflects an alternative vision, by imagining the EU implicitly, not as a ‘global actor’ promoting universal values, but as a concretely situated and spatially bounded community. It will be shown that this is so with the methodological help of private international law, and in particular three doctrines that are traditional to this discipline—the localisation of cross-border relations, international imperativeness, and the public policy exception. This will ultimately allow for a more sophisticated understanding of the EU's territory to emerge—irreducible to the physical coordinates of its acts of intervention, or the mere sum of the physical spaces under Member State sovereignty, but as a distinct space of social relations, informed and delineated by the particular axiology and structure of the EU legal system.

This article explores the doctrine of separability, as understood in particular in the English legal tradition. It does so by reference to the decisions in Sulamérica Cia Nacional de Seguros SA and others v Enesa Engelharia SA and others and ENKA İnşaat ve Sanayi A.Ş. v OOO ‘Insurance Company Chubb’ & Ors that explore the relevance of the concept when determining the law applicable to the arbitration agreement. These decisions largely treat the doctrine as irrelevant to the determination of the law governing the arbitration agreement. They do so because of the way in which English law views separability as tied inimically to the concept of enforcement of the arbitration agreement. This is unsurprising given the content of section 7 of the Arbitration Act 1996 and the position of the doctrine of separability as a legal fiction that must be restricted to its defined purpose. Viewed against the potential reform of the Arbitration Act 1996, the author asks whether a broader view of separability can be adopted. The author's view is that there are cogent and compelling reasons for adopting a broader view, that would promote certainty and consistency in a way that is not best served by the current approach.

Positivists and interpretivists (Dworkinians) might accept that conceptual facts about the law—facts about the content of the concept of law—can obtain in the absence of communities with law practices. But they would deny that legal facts can obtain in such communities’ absence. Under the moral impact theory, by contrast, legal facts can precede all communities with law practices. I identify a set of legal facts in private international law—the law of jurisdiction—that concerns when a community's law practices can, and cannot, have the legal effects that the practices claim to have. This law is noncommunitarian, in the sense that it precedes the communities to which it applies. In this law's light, the legal effects of communities’ law practices are legally coordinated (or, at the very least, can be shown to legally conflict). Although interest in, and even commitment to, a noncommunitarian law of jurisdiction has receded among private international law theorists, I argue that some well-placed questions can elicit from all of us a commitment to this law. And this commitment is a reason to believe that the moral impact theory is correct.

Can claimants choose between contract and tort claims arising on the same facts with different jurisdictional and/or choice-of-law consequences? While domestic legal systems generally recognise concurrent liability, commentators object that its extension to private international law would be unprincipled and would threaten the field's values. This, however, contrasts with the position in common law and under EU Regulations, where concurrent claims are generally recognised with only narrow limits. This article justifies concurrent claims in private international law, arguing that the same premises supporting concurrent liability in domestic law exist in private international law, and that no field-unique concerns foreclose it.

Knowing receipt requires the satisfaction of disparate elements under English domestic law. Its characterisation under domestic law is also unsettled. These in turn affect the issues of characterisation and choice of law at the private international law level, as knowing receipt sits at the intersection of the laws of equity, restitution, wrongs and property. This article argues that under the common law knowing receipt ought to be considered as sui generis for choice of law purposes and governed by the law of closest connection to the claim. Where the Rome II Regulation applies, knowing receipt fits better within the tort rather than unjust enrichment category and the escape clause in Article 4(3) of the Regulation ought to apply.

This paper proposes a historical contextual pedagogy for private international, which helps students reflect on the impact of the field's legal techniques in different historical contexts. To emphasise the richness of a historical lens, the paper reflects on the development and use of private international law tort rules in a colonial, intellectual and gender historical context. By taking Phillips v. Eyre as a reference, the goal is to illustrate how the canonical cases in private international law can serve as entry points towards a broader historical contextualisation of private international law, beyond the doctrine, though inspired by it.