The United Kingdom deposited its instrument of accession to the Hague Convention on Choice of Court Agreements yesterday. The UK is currently bound by the Convention, because the European Union approved the Convention in 2015. Under the terms of that approval, the Convention bound all EU states except Denmark. But with Brexit on the horizon, the new accession is not a surprise.
Longtime readers will know I am interested in the interplay between religious law and civil law. A good example was just argued in the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights. The facts of Molla Sali v. Greece are these. Mr. Molla Sali, a Muslim Greek national, left his entire estate to his wife in his will, which was drawn up by a notary in accordance with Greek civil law. His two sisters contested the will on the grounds that he was a member of the Muslim community in Thrace, and thus that Islamic law rather than Greek civil law governed inheritance in his case. And in fact in the Treaty of Lausanne, Greece agreed to “take, as regards [religious] minorities, in…
Tagged: European Union, Greece, Sharia
The case of the day is In re Schlich (D. Mass. 2016). It arises out of competing claims to invention of CRISPR/Cas9, a new gene editing technology that has gotten a lot of attention in the popular press. Jennifer Doudna of UC Berkeley and her collaborator, Emmanuelle Charpentier, claimed to be the inventors, and Doudna’s company, Intellia Therapeutics, brought an opposition proceeding in Europe seeking to invalidate patents obtained there by the Broad Institute, listing another group of putative inventors, Feng Zhang, Le Cong, Patrick Hsu, and Fei Ran.
Tagged: 1782, European Patent Office, European Union