The Permanent Bureau of the Hague Conference on Private International Law is conducting a public consultation on the draft text of a potential new convention on parallel proceedings. It is encouraging experts, practitioners, and judges from any jurisdiction to complete an online survey. If you have the time and the interest, I hope you will share your thoughts with the Permanent Bureau!

I don’t have strong views on the substance of the proposed Convention or its desirability, but here are a few preliminary thoughts not directly related to the legal substance, but rather to the importance of strengthening international judicial cooperation in our unsettled and troubled times.

Happily, the American attitude towards international judicial assistance was settled decades ago, in a more optimistic and liberal era. The dominant idea was to be generous to foreign litigants, so as to encourage foreign states to be generous to American litigants. That’s why, by and large, we put no limitations on the means foreign litigants can use to serve process in the United States, and why our courts are very liberal in the aid they provide to foreign litigants seeking to obtain evidence here for use abroad. It’s also why final and conclusive foreign money judgments are, by and large, entitled to recognition here as though they were judgments of a US state court, with only limited (but important!) exceptions, and (generally!) without any requirement of reciprocity. If we were just deciding these things today, I have no doubt that our current zero-sum, backward-looking, “we are rugged ‘Murican individualists who don’t need friends and who crap on our allies” nincompoops would turn all of that on its head.

Still, the benefits of a convention on parallel proceedings for the United States is less immediately obvious than the benefit of conventions on service, evidence, or recognition and enforcement of judgments. Given that the United States has not yet ratified either the Convention on Choice of Court Agreements or the Judgments Convention, in the abstract, I would much rather see whatever limited energy our politicians are willing to put into cross-border judicial cooperation into those efforts than into a new effort to harmonize rules on parallel proceedings.

However. In today’s world, it’s important that we strengthen rather than weaken the legal ties between states, for reasons that don’t have anything to do with the, let’s face it, basically obscure questions of forum non conveniens, antisuit injunctions, and lis alibi pendens. So my hope is that this potential convention flies under the radar of US political appointees, that the US participate in the HCCH’s process at a technical and expert level, and that the brave folks who have stuck it out in the corners of the State and Justice Departments that work on private international law do what can be done to put the US in a position to sign a new convention, assuming it is eventually opened for signature.