Suchergebnisse

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In Belgian family law practice, spouses may seize the justice of peace of disputes which require immediate attention. The justice of peace has special jurisdiction to issue urgent and preliminary relief in marital disputes. In this paper, I examine how this special jurisdiction is affected by the Brussels IIbis Regulation (Regulation 2201/2003) of the EU. In particular the question arises whether the justice of peace may simply refer to Article 20 of this Regulation in order to justify the exercise of jurisdiction, or whether the justice of peace should examine each head of relief sought by the plaintiff, with a view to determine whether the relief sought indeed falls within the ambit of the Regulation. I also examine how the requirements of territoriality, as construed by the Court of Justice, may be interpreted in the context of marital disputes.

In his 'Perpetual Peace', Kant indicts the natural law tradition (Grotius, Pufendorf, Vattel) as 'miserable comforters' whose principles and doctrines 'cannot have the slightest legal force'. The indictment emerges from Kant's critique of natural law in both its empirical and rationalist variants as unable to uphold a really 'binding' notion of cosmopolitan legality. Since the early 1990s a new literature has emerged in the International Relations field that speaks about the effectiveness and legitimacy of international law as a form of supranational 'governance'. This article argues that that literature raises precisely the same problems that Kant detected in early modern natural law. Like the latter, this literature is best seen as an attempt to appropriate the voice of international legality to a fully instrumentalist discipline dedicated to serving the interests of power.