International and Comparative Law Quarterly: Volume 73, Issue 4
The latest issue of the International and Comparative Law Quarterly (Volume 73, Issue 4) features two short articles on private international law.
Maria Hook, The Purpose of the Gateways for Service out of the Jurisdiction, pp 1023-1044
This article argues that the purpose of the English gateways for service out of the jurisdiction is to identify a presumptive meaningful connection; that courts have used different mechanisms to rebut the presumption of a meaningful connection established by the gateways; and that there are lessons to be learnt from a clearer, more explicit understanding of this presumptive purpose of the gateways. The article uses Brownlie (I and II) and Fong v Ascentic Ltd to support and illustrate these arguments.
This article discusses the United Kingdom Supreme Court judgment in Zubaydah v Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, which addressed the law governing the tort liability of the United Kingdom Government for its alleged complicity in the claimant’s arbitrary detention and torture overseas by the Central Intelligence Agency. In holding that English law applied, the Court departed from previous case law by giving decisive weight to public law factors in its choice-of-law reasoning. This decision arguably heralds a greater role for English law in relation to tort claims brought by overseas victims of allegedly wrongful exercises of British executive authority as a mechanism for achieving executive accountability, controlling abuse of power, ensuring the rule of law and providing victims access to remedy.