International News

The U.S. legal system is the most expensive in the world in proportion to its GDP and costs roughly 150 percent more than the average Eurozone legal system, according to a study released Wednesday by the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform.

The British Government risks importing the worst excesses of the American class actions system if it goes ahead with plans to allow consumers to bring wide-ranging claims against companies, the US Chamber of Commerce has warned.

For years French governments have promised to permit class-action lawsuits. But French businesses hate the idea and besides, who wants to copy the Americans? Now, however, François Hollande and his Socialists may allow such suits, if a bill on consumer rights presented to the Council of Ministers on May 2nd is adopted in anything like its present form.

The number of international litigants turning to the Commercial Court to resolve disputes has increased by 30 per cent since March 2009, new research reveals, while the number of domestic litigants is on on the wane.

An Ontario court rejected an attempt by Ecuadorean plaintiffs to collect a multibillion-dollar environmental award from Chevron Corp. in Canada, giving the oil company a fresh victory in a legal battle that has sprawled far beyond the Amazonian jungles where it began.

Commentators have bemoaned the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum as the "death" of liability under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS). The American Lawyer's Michael Goldhaber wrote that the court had rendered the corporate alien tort "a zombie doctrine—not quite alive and not quite dead." But can a cause of action be killed, or even zombified, if it never existed in the first place?