International Commercial Courts: Will Paris Eat London’s Lunch?

The establishment of an international chamber in the Paris Commercial Court aimed at competing with and divesting judicial business from the London Commercial Court. As the possibility that the United Kingdom would stop participating in the various instruments of judicial cooperation adopted by the European Union appeared to be increasingly credible, the governments of a number of EU Member States saw an opportunity to divest the judicial business of the London Commercial Court to their own courts. More specifically, it was believed that, as the EU judgments regulations would cease to apply as between the UK and EU Member States, the attractiveness of English courts would suffer as the recognition and enforcement of English judgments in the EU would not anymore be (almost) guaranteed.

Yet, it does not seem that the promoters of continental international courts in general, and of the French international chambers in particular made any effort to assess the number and nature of cases that they could hope to attract. The goal of the article that I have just published in Perspectives Contentieuses Internationales is to conduct this inquiry by studying and comparing the international caseloads of the London Commercial Court and the international chamber of the Paris Commercial Court.

The first part of the Article reflects on the conditions for international judicial competition and argues that the many types of cases that each of the two courts handles reveal the existence of different markets, which are not all competitive and international.

The second part offers an empirical study of the caseloads of the two courts focusing on potentially competitive markets only. It then argues that the international attractiveness of commercial courts is revealed by the origin of the parties and assesses the attractiveness of each of two courts by distinguishing the cases on this basis.

The Article can be freely downloaded here.