CPLC Seminar: 'Recasting the Common Law Recognition-and-Enforcement Regime'

Speaker: Dr Ardavan Arzandeh, University of Bristol

The principal aim of this paper is to revisit the English common law rules on the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments in personam. It seeks to demonstrate that, mainly due to the narrow conception of the foreign courts’ ‘international jurisdictional competence’, the operation of this aspect of the English conflict-of-laws rules gives rise to problematic outcomes. The discussion then proceeds to identify and evaluate three of the main doctrinal models which have been proposed in response to these shortcomings. As the paper seeks to highlight, despite their virtues, on balance, none of these models provides the desirable basis for reformulating the law. In these circumstances, the paper sets out to advance an alternative approach for recasting the recognition-and-enforcement regime at common law. In this regard, it is argued that the foreign courts’ international jurisdictional competence should be defined more broadly as to include the jurisdictional ‘gateways’ presently codified within CPR PD 6B para. 3.1.

This seminar is open to all LLM, MCL and PhD students, Faculty members and Faculty visitors.