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The Burden to Show Foreign Sovereign Immunity
Bill Dodge has an excellent post up at the Transnational Litigation Blog that asks who has the burden of demonstrating that a foreign state is, or is not, immune from suit under the doctrine of foreign sovereign immunity. On the one hand, the question seems settled: most circuits, including the DC Circuit and the Second……
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The Dover Amendment and the FSIA
The First Church in Somerville, Massachusetts, has a plan to renovate part of the church building and rent it out to the Somerville Homeless Coalition, a secular group that aids the homeless, according to a report in the Boston Globe. Under the plan, the Coalition will house the homeless in the new space (the Coalition……
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Case of the Day: Missouri v. China
The case of the day is Missouri v. People’s Republic of China (8th Cir. 2024). I’ve written about the case before, most recently in July 2022. The gist of the case is that Missouri seeks to hold the Chinese government, the Chinese Communist Party, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, etc. liable for harms resulting from……
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The Case of the Bhutanese Air Conditioner
The New York Times reported on the story of the New Yorkers who live in an apartment building near the United Nations. Their building is next-door to Bhutan’s permanent mission to the UN. According to the neighbors, Bhutan keeps a “vexingly loud air-conditioning unit on the roof of the building.” So far, they haven’t had……
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China Amends Its Foreign Sovereign Immunity Law
Bill Dodge has an excellent post at the Transnational Litigation Blog explaining China’s new Foreign State Immunity Law, which adopts the restrictive theory of foreign sovereign immunity. The United States and many other countries follow the restrictive theory, but China, until now, had been one of the holdouts for the older absolute theory of foreign……