The following summaries are of recent published decisions of the California appellate courts, the Ninth Circuit, and the United States Supreme Court. The summaries are presented without regard to whether Severson & Werson represented a party in the case.
Plaintiff was a licensed solicitor in London and the subject of disciplinary proceedings before the independent regulatory body that governs solicitors and barristers in the UK. He traveled to California and then claimed he was too ill to return to the UK, so an adjournment of the disciplinary proceedings should be continued. Defendant, a doctor, was appointed as a neutral… Read More
Plaintiffs sufficiently alleged, for purposes of the Alien Tort Statute, that (1) cocoa purchasers’ conduct in paying personal spending money to Ivory Coast growers—despite knowledge of their use of child slave labor—was not ordinary business conduct and (2) the payments were made from the United States, even though the slave labor itself occurred overseas. Read More
When a question of foreign law arises, the burden is on the party relying on foreign law to raise the specific legal issues governed by foreign law and to provide the district court with the information needed to determine the meaning of the foreign law; if this burden is not met, the district court may rely on other law, usually… Read More
FRCP 44.1 permits federal courts to determine the meaning of a foreign country’s law, and in doing so, the court should accord respectful consideration to a foreign government’s submission regarding the meaning of its own law; but the court is not ultimately bound by that submission. Read More
A trial court erred in denying plaintiff enforcement of its $11 million judgment against defendant obtained in a court in Moscow, Russia, since defendant failed to establish any valid defense under the Uniform Foreign-Country Money Judgment Recognition Act and official court documents adequately proved sufficient service of process on defendant’s registered Moscow address. Read More
For purposes of enforcing a foreign judgment, a party was afforded sufficient due process, if the foreign court followed "procedures compatible with the requirements of fundamental fairness" even if the litigants were not given the specific constitutional due process guarantees afforded litigants in U.S. courts. Read More
When a motion to dismiss raises a question of foreign law, the court may consider declarations or other "evidentiary" material regarding the content of relevant foreign law without converting the motion into a summary judgment motion; here, the Court of Appeal held that a French “astreinte” award was an enforceable foreign damage judgment, not an unenforceable penalty. Read More
