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Friday, 13 May 2016 - 1.00pm

Austen Parrish is the Dean and James H. Rudy Professor of Law at Indiana University Bloomington’s Maurer School of Law. Dean Parrish’s research and scholarship focuses on transnational litigation, international law and relations, and other issues related to transnational justice. His recent writings have focused on critiquing the use of extraterritorial domestic laws and the role that national courts play in solving global challenges. With expertise in Canada-US transboundary relations, from 2003 to 2010 he directed an international and comparative summer law program hosted by Southwestern Law School and the International Centre for Criminal Law Reform and Criminal Justice Policy at the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Law in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. Prior to entering academia, Dean Parrish was an attorney with O'Melveny and Myers, a global law firm.

Lecture summary: In recent years in a series of jurisdictional decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court has scaled back the ability of litigants to use U.S. courts as a forum for resolving foreign disputes. That retreat from court access has commonly be viewed as disengagement from or hostility towards international law and human rights. The recent decisions then have been lamented as a step back not only for transnational public law litigation, but for overall transnational justice. That narrative, however, is at least incomplete if not misleading. Over the past twenty-five years, the waxing and waning of extraterritorial regulation in the U.S. has commonly been in tension with the development of international law and institutions. The recent retreat from embracing a broad role for U.S. courts in transnational justice has been driven not only by those interested in bolstering parochial interests, but also by those worried that this broader role may in the long term undermine meaningful international norm development.

This lecture will describe the rise and recent fall of transnational litigation in the U.S. It will begin by tracing the growth of extraterritorial regulation, and will describe how this growth was spurred by domestic political struggles as well as the ideas of particular legal theorists, who attempted to remake international jurisdictional law. More recently, courts and others in the United States have become nervous over the implications of broad, unilateral assertions of extraterritorial power and have sought ways to stall the erosion of law’s territorial limits. Dean Parrish will describe some of the key U.S. Supreme Court decisions that have done so. Finally, he suggests that this current turn away from international litigation in U.S. courts may be understood as much as a reaffirmation of international law and international jurisdictional principles than as an attack on them.

The Snyder Lectures are held in memory of Dr. Earl Snyder, a 1947 Indiana University law graduate, and serve as a unique partnership between the University of Cambridge and the IU Maurer School of Law. The annual lectures are held alternately in Cambridge and Bloomington and are subsequently published in the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies (IJGLS). Past speakers include Sir Elihu Lauterpacht, Professor Alfred Aman, Professor James Crawford, and Professor Jost Delbrück. A related Snyder Scholarship programme also operates.

 

Speaker: Professor Austen Parrish, Dean and James H. Rudy Professor of Law, Indiana University Maurer School of Law

Date: Friday, 13 May

Time: 1pm with sandwiches from 12.30pm

Venue: Finley Library, Lauterpacht Centre, 5 Cranmer Rd, Cambridge


Lauterpacht Centre - Term Lecture Programme and Information »

Numbers are limited so please arrive early to avoid disappointment. Please note the lecture programme is subject to revision without notice. 

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