Herrup and Brand on Hague Conference Concurrent Proceedings Project

Paul Herrup and Ronald A. Brand (University of Pittsburgh – School of Law) have made available on SSRN a paper on the developments in the Hague Conference project on concurrent proceedings, titled A Further Look at a Hague Convention on Concurrent Proceedings.

The abstract reads as follows:

The current project of the Hague Conference on Private International Law has reached a critical juncture that requires careful consideration of the terms that delineate the scope of the proposed convention. Work to date has not followed the mandate of the Council on General Affairs and Policy to produce a convention that would deal with concurrent proceedings, understood as including pure parallel proceedings and related actions. In two previous articles we have addressed the practical needs that should be addressed by the concurrent proceedings project and the general architecture of such a convention. The process is now mired in terminological confusion that has hampered progress on a practical result. Differing interpretations of the directions given to those doing the work has led to situations in which the participants have been speaking past each other. In this article, we provide a reminder of the common law/civil law divergence of approaches to concurrent litigation; review the approach taken in the EU’s Brussels I (Recast) Regulation and the problems it has created; and offer suggestions regarding the proper scope and architecture of a global convention addressing the problem of concurrent proceedings.

The paper follows earlier shared contributions on the topic from the same authors that can be accessed here and here.

More information on the on-going work on this topic at the Hague Conference can be found on the Jurisdiction Project page in the Conference’s website.