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In its work to maintain and develop the free mobility of judgments within the European Union, the EU approved on 22 December 2000 a new regulation1 (hereafter the Jurisdiction Regulation) that replaced the Brussels Convention with effect from 1 March 2002.2 Possibly the most discussed and disputed new development in the Jurisdiction Regulation is Section 4, which concerns jurisdiction over consumer contracts. Before the approval of the Regulation, the provisions of Section 4 were heavily debated. The unreserved right of the consumer, under certain circumstances, to sue the other party in the courts of the State where the consumer is domiciled met strong resistance. This was particularly the case in relation to e-commerce, where there was an expressed fear that the provisions would lead to a scenario where anyone doing business through the Internet or by other electronic means could face the risk of being hauled into court in every state in Europe. It was asserted that this would significantly increase the costs of establishing new businesses online, and that, as a result, small and medium size enterprises would be deterred from offering their products online throughout the EU, and restrain the development of e-commerce in Europe.

"The current jurisdictional status of the Mediterranean Sea is notably different from other enclosed or semi-enclosed seas. Nearly fifty per cent of the Mediterranean waters are high seas and are therefore beyond the jurisdiction of coastal States, this is despite the fact that there are no points in the Mediterranean Sea where the coasts of two States would be more than 400 nm apart. Such a legal situation generally prevents coastal States from adopting and enforcing their laws on the Mediterranean high seas in respect of many important fields such as the protection and preservation of the marine environment, as well as the conservation of marine living resources. However, when it comes to the Adriatic Sea, a sub-sea and sub-region of the Mediterranean, Croatia has proclaimed an Ecological and Fisheries Protection Zone-EFPZ, Slovenia has proclaimed a Zone of Ecological Protection while Italy has adopted a framework law for the proclamation of its Zone of Ecological Protection without actually proclaiming its regime.This book examines the actual or potential extension of coastal State jurisdiction in the Adriatic Sea against the background of similar extensions elsewhere in the Mediterranean. The work considers what the implications and benefits of the extension of coastal State jurisdiction in the Adriatic Sea would be, as well as the maritime boundary delimitation problems which would need to be resolved. The books assesses the legal nature of Part IX of UNCLOS on enclosed or semi-enclosed seas, which call for enhanced cooperation between States surrounding enclosed and semi-enclosed seas in order to facilitate effective management, conservation, exploration and exploitation of the living resources of the sea. It explores whether Part IX of UNCLOS imposes any duties of cooperation in relation to the extension of coastal State jurisdiction in enclosed or semi-enclosed seas. Drawing all this together the book puts forward practical suggestions as to how the issue of extension of coastal State jurisdiction could be approached in a way which would enhance States existing cooperation and improve the overall governance of the enclosed and semi-enclosed seas both in the Adriatic and beyond. This book will be of interest to interest to academics and students of international law, international and regional organizations dealing with law of the sea matters and government officials."--

Historically, public international law and private international law have been treated as two different legal systems that function more or less independently. Public international law regulates activity among human beings operating in groups called, nation-states, while private international law regulates the activities of smaller subgroups or of individuals as they interact with each other. Since the public international legal system coordinates the interaction of collective human interests through decentralized mechanisms and private international law coordinates the interaction of individual or subgroup interests primarily through centralized mechanisms, these coordinating functions are usually carried out in different forums, each appropriate to the task. The differences between the processes by which sanctions for violation of community norms are applied in the two systems and the differences in the nature of the units making up the communities that establish those norms tend to obscure the fact that both the public and the private international systems coordinate human behavior, and that thus the values that inform both systems must necessarily be the same.

This Oxford Handbook provides interdisciplinary perspectives on international adjudication, analysing the proliferation of international courts and tribunals from the perspective of both international law and political science. It presents the different theoretical approaches to these courts, their main functions, and the issues confronting them.

The dissertation explores the politics of jurisdiction in international law. In order to do so, it reconstructs jurisdictional projects pursued by scholars and experts particularly in the context of 'humanity's law'. The thesis concentrates on (legal) technicalities and argues for the importance to 'open black boxes' such as interdisciplinarity, expertise – or jurisdiction. In a first part, it primarily focuses on the (inter)disciplinary dimension of studying the politics of international law by mapping different interdisciplinary projects between International Relations and International Law, and highlighting core topics among critical scholars in both disciplines. In a second part, the dissertation moves then to analyse the concept of jurisdiction in world politics. It situates discussions about jurisdiction within the discourse on the politics of international legal expertise and argues, by means of problematization and historical inquiry, to leave the common notion of jurisdiction in international law (as exclusive and territorial) behind and instead to grasp jurisdiction as non-territorial, post-Cartesian, multidimensional and non-exclusive. This becomes particularly visible in the context of 'humanity's law'. Therefore, the dissertation ends with two explorations into the politics of jurisdiction in 'humanity's law': first, it analyses the politics of crimes in international criminal law and how by means of widening the scope of international crimes international legal experts attempt to augment this strand of 'humanity's law'; second, it explores how in the broader discourse on humanitarian intervention within and around the United Nations jurisdictional projects expand, through risk-based forms of governance, through time.