Guest Blogger: Hannah Buxbaum

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Hannah Buxbaum (left) as today's guest blogger.

Associate Dean for Research and Professor of Law at Indiana University School of Law in Bloomington, Hannah teaches Comparative Law, Contracts, International Business Transactions, and International Litigation. Her publications, which have appeared in English and in German, treat issues of of private international law and international litigation and jurisdiction. Her guest post below examines U.S. courts and what she call the "foreign-cubed" class action.

Hannah earned her B.A. and J.D. degrees from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, and an LL.M. from the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Before joining Indiana's faculty, she worked in the New York and Frankfurt offices of Davis Polk & Wardwell. A member of the Executive Committee of the American Society of Comparative Law, Hannah serves as co-book review editor of the American Journal of Comparative Law, is a member of the International Academy of Comparative Law and the American Law Institute, and has served on the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law (the last body, coincidentally, is discussed today in another post below).

Hannah would like to dedicate her guest post to a transnational pioneer: her mom, Wiebke Buxbaum, who was born and raised in Germany. She received her doctorate in law from the University of Cologne and then an LL.M. from the University of California at Berkeley. After deciding to make her home in the United States, she "started over," as Hannah puts it, earning a J.D. from Berkeley and joining Brobeck Phleger & Harrison, where she specialized in corporate and banking law and became the 1st woman to make partner at that San Francisco firm.

Write On!

(Write On! is an occasional item about notable calls for papers.) Just a note to highlight Cambridge Press's journal International Theory, an important source for topflight interdisciplinary and theoretical international law scholarship.
In the Journal's words:

International Theory (IT) promotes theoretical scholarship about the positive, legal, and normative aspects of world politics respectively. IT is open to theory of absolutely all varieties and from all disciplines, provided it addresses problems of politics, broadly defined and pertains to the international. IT welcomes scholarship that uses evidence from the real world to advance theoretical arguments. However, IT is intended as a forum where scholars can develop theoretical arguments in depth without an expectation of extensive empirical analysis. IT’s over-arching goal is to promote communication and engagement across theoretical and disciplinary traditions. IT puts a premium on contributors’ ability to reach as broad an audience as possible, both in the questions they engage and in their accessibility to other approaches. This might be done by addressing problems that can only be understood by combining multiple disciplinary discourses, like institutional design, or practical ethics; or by addressing phenomena that have broad ramifications, like civilizing processes in world politics, or the evolution of environmental norms. IT is also open to work that remains within one scholarly tradition, although in that case authors must make clear the horizon of their arguments in relation to other theoretical
approaches.

All articles will be anonymously peer-reviewed by a stellar list of editors.

So, get busy, IntLawGrrls!

Legal transnationalization in French case involving crimes against humanity

Many thanks to IntLawGrrls for inviting this guest post on my article just published at 56 American Journal of Comparative Law 363 (2008), "Globalization, Legal Transnationalization and Crimes Against Humanity: The Lipietz Case." The article takes a look at how law is transnationalizing within national legal systems, in processes that are not officially recognized or acknowledged.
Particular attention is paid to a recent, highly controversial French case -- Lipietz v. the State and the SNCF, the French national railway, which in 1944 had deported civil mining engineer Georges Lipietz, 21, and others to Drancy, the French internment camp near Paris. Decided in June 2006, the case marked the unofficial entry into the French legal system of a tort action for complicity in crimes against humanity. (Judgment here; English translation here.) The article demonstrates that the 2006 decision -- subsequently overruled by a higher court with respect to 1 of the defendants -- was modeled on Anglo-American tort law concepts that do not fit within the French legal tradition.
Under French law, the plaintiffs normally would have brought their claim in a criminal court, because the underlying allegations concerned a crime against humanity; however, the plaintiffs in this case were precluded from doing so for technical reasons. When the Administrative Court of Toulouse held in plaintiffs' favor, an uproar ensued in France. (Prior IntLawGrrls post here.) Some of the reaction was due to unarticulated distress at the court’s departure from entrenched categories of French law, I suggest, and thus to the rupture of associations between those categories and equally entrenched national assumptions about justice.
The article also explores why national courts can be motivated to change law unofficially even when the effect may be likely to elicit widespread public displeasure and even when the national legal system may not be equipped to adapt to such changes. Finally, it posits current challenges of legal transnationalization:
► identifying when such transnationalization occurs;
► understanding the consequences of legal transnationalization; and
►developing adequate measures to adapt to such transnationalization.