English law

        The recent revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and more recently Libya (United Nations members) have produced not only civilian casualties, but also what the international community is calling unlawful detainment of anti-government protestors. In Egypt, many of the detainees are still being held incommunicado (without access to family or lawyers) with no official charges or reasonable justification …

        Picture yourself in a boat on a river, with tangerine trees and marmalade skies.  If that did not set any cogs in motion then perhaps a simple description of old flattop with his joo-joo eyeballs might have a more stimulating effect.  Of course, with a little help from John Lennon, I am talking about those four, …

          Every four years, the President of the United States is elected. Barack Obama, who has held this position since 2008, faced a challenge in November 2010 in the form of the US Midterm Elections (logically so-called as they fall two years into his four-year term).           On the 2nd of November, …

      The personality of the Directive – one of the EC’s three main legislative instruments – has undergone major alteration in its short history. We shall see two competing trends, noted by Dashwood, – the need to secure the potency of Community law, and the need to follow faithfully the provisions of the EC Treaty – leading to …

          When parties to a contract disagree on the meaning of the contract they have entered into, judges may have to interpret the unclear wording of the contract in order to establish its ‘true meaning’.           In Investors Compensation Scheme Ltd v West Bromwich Building Society1, Lord Hoffman summarised the principles upon …

        On Thursday, 22nd of September, the ICC’s Young Arbitrators Forum and Castaldi Mourre & Partners co-organized a round table to discuss two hot topics related to international commercial arbitration. The discussion with worldwide practitioner’s, focused on the application of “Jura novit curia” to international arbitration and the eventual creation of a code of ethics specific to …

Tough talk and tough laws do not always mean tough action. That was a lesson learned during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, which resulted in billions of Euros of bailouts for struggling banks and financial institutions deemed ‘too big to fail’. It is perhaps also a lesson which will be repeated in the current Greek sovereign debt crisis, where the latter …

    The tension is rising… President Obama  has agreed to see the Dalai Lama, the arms sale deal  to Taiwan is nearly closed , the  low Chinese currency rate debate is escalating,  and now the Google censorship dispute  may be going to the WTO tribunal (World Trade Organization) Quite clearly US –China relations are severely  strained  at the moment.       …

  At first look, we’re talking about omissions; but that’s not the whole picture. Indeed, the true nature of the question resides primarily in what I’m going to argue is our ‘social mould’. The classic omissions scenario of the baby drowning in a puddle covers one aspect of this, but we’ll argue about that later. Our first concern should be …

  “EU citizenship” is a concept that gained legal status by Articles 17-18 of the TEU. The ECJ has repeatedly used this Delphic phrase “will become the fundamental status of EU nationals” with little or no explanation. I argue here that the correct interpretation of the Court’s case law hinges on how we understand “fundamental status”.     Within the …