First Issue of 2021’s Revue Critique de Droit International Privé

The new issue of the Revue Critique de Droit International Privé (1/2021) is out.

It contains four articles and numerous case notes. The editorial by Horatia Muir Watt (Sciences Po), Dominique Bureau (University of Paris II) and Sabine Corneloup (University of Paris II) will soon be available in English on the Dalloz website (Dans le désordre planétaire…).

In the first article, Didier Boden (University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) proposes to rethink the private international law lexicon in order to achieve a uniform analysis of the coordination between legal orders (« Erga- » : Contribution sémantique et lexicale à une étude unifiée des relations entre ordres juridiques).

Private international law and the other sets of rules of a legal order which touch upon its relations with other legal orders are poorly named and poorly defined. This article proposes to remedy that lexical impropriety and that semantic deficiency by presenting a new collection of names and a new collection of definitions.

In the second article, Frederick T. Davis (Columbia Law School) and Charlotte Gunka (Lawyer at the New York bar) discusse the possibilities offered by the American CLOUD Act in terms of criminal and digital sovereignty, under a European and global perspective (Perquisitionner les nuages – CLOUD Act, souveraineté européenne et accès à la preuve dans l’espace pénal numérique).

At a time when the Covid-19 crisis has raised awareness over the urgent need for European Member States to enhance their national sovereignty through the European Union, it is essential to go back to the possibilities offered by the U.S. CLOUD Act with regard to criminal and digital sovereignty. The CLOUD Act proposes a reform of current mutual legal assistance mechanisms by establishing access to digital evidence as the benchmark authorizing computer searches outside state borders, regardless of the location of the relevant data. Although this benchmark allows for more extensive extraterritorial application of U.S. criminal proceedings, an analysis of European regulations and legislation currently in force in France and the United Kingdom confirms that the European approach is not so different from the one introduced by the U.S. government. The emergence of the computer world and the acceleration of new technologies have created a “criminal digital space”, ephemeral and borderless, which requires a fundamental transformation of criminal procedures allowing for faster and more efficient international cooperation against transnational crime. This should give an opportunity to Europe, in particular through its new European Public Prosecutor’s Office, to assert its digital sovereignty through the individual fundamental rights that it continues to promote without undermining the security and strategic interests of its Member States.

In the third article, Vincent Richard (MPI Luxembourg) also deals with (digital) evidence in international dispute resolution, but within the European cooperation in civil matters. The author analyses the recast of the “Taking of Evidence” Regulation (La refonte du règlement sur l’obtention des preuves en matière civile).

Regulation (EU) n°2020/1783 adopted on 25 november 2020 recasts Regulation (EC) n° 1206/2001 on cooperation between the courts of the Member States in the taking of evidence in civil or commercial matters. Requests for the taking of evidence between Member States shall be transmitted through a decentralised IT system such as e-CODEX. The recast also aims at enhancing the attractiveness of the Regulation by broadening the concept of court and by encouraging direct taking of evidence by the requesting court.

In the fourth article, Thibaut Fleury Graff (University of Rennes) addresses the topical issue of international migration under a legal perspective (Droit des étrangers et des migrations : entre protection de l’ordre public et définitions de la liberté).

 The full table of contents is available here.