The past two hundred years have seen the transformation of public international law from a rule-based extrusion of diplomacy into a fully-fledged legal system. Landmark Cases in Public International Law examines decisions that have contributed to the development of international law into an integrated whole, whilst also creating specialised sub-systems that stand alone as units of analysis. The significance of these decisions is not taken for granted, with contributors critically interrogating the cases to determine if their reputation as 'landmarks' is deserved. Emphasis is also placed on seeing each case as a diplomatic artefact, highlighting that international law, while unquestionably a legal system, remains reliant on the practice and consent of states as the prime movers of development. The cases selected cover a broad range of subject areas including state immunity, human rights, the environment, trade and investment, international organisations, international courts and tribunals, the laws of war, international crimes, and the interface between international and municipal legal systems. A wide array of international and domestic courts are also considered, from the International Court of Justice to the European Court of Human Rights, World Trade Organization Appellate Body, US Supreme Court and other adjudicative bodies. The result is a three-dimensional picture of international law: what it was, what it is, and what it might yet become.

This collection of essays contains in-depth analyses of eighteen landmark cases in private international law, from Penn v Lord Baltimore in 1750 to Brownlie v FS Cairo (Nile Plaza) LLC in 2021. The contributors are experts drawn from academia and practice as well as from the bench. Case law has been a central driver in the legal development of the English conflict of laws. Judge-made law does not just supply a source of law itself but also acts as the crucible in which other sources of law – legislation, international Treaty, European regulation, and ideas generated by jurists such as Joseph Story and Albert Venn Dicey – have been tested and applied. This book sheds new light on the past and future evolution of private international law by focusing on the landmark cases which have fundamentally shaped the way that we think about this subject. The focus is on the English common law, but landmarks in Scotland, Australia and Canada are covered as well. Many of them concern disputes between commercial parties; others deal with issues such as marriage and domicile; and some arise from controversies in political, constitutional and international affairs. The landmark cases tackled in this collection address significant issues in civil jurisdiction, governing law, foreign judgments, and public policy. The essays place those landmarks in their historical context, explain their contemporary importance, and consider their future relevance.

The first casebook of its kind, Judicial Decisions on the Law of International Organizations contains relevant excerpts of leading court opinions and decisions on the law of international organizations (international institutional law) and critical commentaries written by leading experts in the field.

Landmark Cases in the Law of Contract offers twelve original essays by leading contract scholars. As with the essays in the companion volume, Landmark Cases in the Law of Restitution (Hart, 2006) each essay takes as its focus a particular leading case, and analyses that case in its historical or theoretical context. The cases range from the early eighteenth- to the late twentieth-centuries, and deal with an array of contractual doctrines. Some of the essays call for their case to be stripped of its landmark status, whilst others argue that it has more to offer than we have previously appreciated. The particular historical context of these landmark cases, as revealed by the authors, often shows that our current assumptions about the case and what it stands for are either mistaken, or require radical modification. The book also explores several common themes which are fundamental to the development of the law of contract: for instance, the influence of commercial expectations, appeals to 'reason' and the significance of particular judicial ideologies and techniques.

This new addition to Hart's acclaimed Landmark Cases series is a diverse and engaging edited collection bringing together eminent commentators from the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, to analyse cases of enduring significance to privacy law. The book tackles the conceptual nature of privacy in its various guises, from data protection, to misuse of private information, and intrusion into seclusion. It explores the practical issues arising from questions about the threshold of actionability, the function of remedies, and the nature of damages. The cases selected are predominantly English but include cases from the United States (because of the formative influence of United States' privacy jurisprudence on the development of privacy law), Australia, Canada, the Court of Justice of the European Union, and the European Court of Human Rights. Each chapter considers the reception and application (and, in some instances, rejection) outside of the jurisdiction where the case was decided.

This volume explores the nature of intellectual property law by looking at particular disputes. All the cases gathered here aim to show the versatile and unstable character of a discipline still searching for landmarks. Each contribution offers an opportunity to raise questions about the narratives that have shaped the discipline throughout its short but profound history. The volume begins by revisiting patent litigation to consider the impact of the Statute of Monopolies (1624). It continues looking at different controversies to describe how the existence of an author's right in literary property was a plausible basis for legal argument, even though no statute expressly mentioned authors' rights before the Statute of Anne (1710). The collection also explores different moments of historical significance for intellectual property law: the first trade mark injunctions; the difficulties the law faced when protecting maps; and the origins of originality in copyright law. Similarly, it considers the different ways of interpreting patent claims in the late nineteenth and twentieth century; the impact of seminal cases on passing off and the law of confidentiality; and more generally, the construction of intellectual property law and its branches in their interaction with new technologies and marketing developments. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the development of intellectual property law.

This global study provides a definitive reference guide to the key choice of law principles on international contracts, including 60 national and regional reports written by experts from all parts of the world, and a dedicated commentary on the Hague Principles as applied to international commercial arbitration.

Co-published by WIPO and the Hague Conference on Private International Law, this guide is a pragmatic tool, written by judges, for judges, examining how private international law operates in intellectual property (IP) matters. Using illustrative references to selected international and regional instruments and national laws, the guide aims to help judges apply the laws of their own jurisdiction, supported by an awareness of key issues concerning jurisdiction of the courts, applicable law, the recognition and enforcement of judgments, and judicial cooperation in cross-border IP disputes.

It is the thesis of this fascinating and highly instructive book on competition law that an examination of one landmark case, scenario, or 'saga' each from a range of legal systems leads to a thorough understanding of the issues informing and arising from competition policy, law, and legal practice. To that end, leading scholars from 14 jurisdictions enhance their academic authority and rigour with an element of panache to describe a particularly salient case in each of their countries, commenting in depth on the contribution of the case to the development of their particular competition law culture and to the case’s enduring significance for competition law and its enforcement from a global perspective. There are chapters for each of thirteen countries as well as the European Union, preceded by an informative and thoughtful introduction. For each landmark case selected, the legislative background, the case facts, and the legal ruling and reasoning are all minutely described, along with commentary, critique, and assessment of the case’s impact and contemporary significance. The cases cover vast swathes of the competition law territory in terms of substance and procedure, dealing with cartels, abuse of dominance, mergers, and vertical restraints, and involving diverse forms of public and private enforcement processes. Aspects covered include the following: the public interest test; bid-rigging in public procurement; the entitlement of dominant companies to compete on a level footing with other companies; the hard-to-draw line between legitimate competition and unlawful monopolizing conduct; the dangers of eclectic borrowing in the development and interpretation of competition law rules; horizontal price-fixing collusion ‘hub and spoke’ cartels; resale price maintenance agreements and the U.S. ‘rule of reason’; the increasing use of private enforcement and the right for victims of a competition law infringement to seek compensation; merger control in energy markets and the political use of merger review rules to benefit domestic firms; cooperation with criminal enforcement agencies and prosecutors; the role courts play in undertaking adequate legal supervision of competition authorities; leniency processes and obtaining access to ‘confidential’ whistleblowing documentation; imposition of administrative fines and other deterrence-based sanctions; and how the ‘consumer welfare’ standard is interpreted. More than a set of landmark case descriptions, this book, in which many chapters reflect upon recent and consider further future significant reforms, demonstrates that competition law and its enforcement processes form part of a chronological narrative, and that it is important to understand the broader legal, social, and economic context within which competition law and policy develop. This wider perspective will prove immeasurably valuable to the many practitioners, business people, jurists, and policy makers engaged in the shaping of competition law in any jurisdiction, and will moreover be essential reading for postgraduate students studying any aspects of comparative competition law enforcement.

This monograph considers the application of general rules of international law to islands, as well as special rules focused on islands, notably Article 121 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Such rules have been applied in several landmark cases in recent years, including the International Court of Justice’s judgments in Territorial and Maritime Dispute (Nicaragua v. Colombia), and arbitral awards in the Chagos Marine Protected Area Arbitration (Mauritius v. United Kingdom) and the South China Sea Arbitration (Philippines v. China). Among other things, this monograph explores: the legal concepts of “islands”, “rocks” and “low-tide elevations”; methods of securing sovereignty over and the maritime zones generated by islands; islands and historic titles, bays and rights; problems of delimitation in the presence of islands; legal issues arising from changes in islands over time (notably from climate change); and contemporary techniques for resolving disputes over islands.