Tag: FSIA

  • 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……

  • Service of Process Since 2016: What’s New?

    The fourth edition of the Practical Handbook on the Operation of the Service Convention was published in 2016. With a meeting of the Special Commission likely to take place next year, it’s a good time to step back and ask: what have been the major American developments in the law of service since then? I……

  • Case of the Day: Turkiye Halk Bankasi A.S. v. United States

    The case of the day is Turkiye Halk Bankasi AS v. United States (S. Ct. 2023). I wrote about the case in the District Court. It presents a simple legal question: does the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act govern the question whether a foreign state, or the instrumentality of a foreign state, is immune from jurisdiction……

  • Update: the Briefs in Chiejina v. Nigeria

    I reported on the decision denying a jurisdictional motion to dismiss in Chiejina v. Nigeria, an award enforcement case I’m handling, back in August 2022. The dispute involved breaches of a contract for construction of gully erosion control structures in Nigeria’s Imo state. The parties have now filed their briefs in the DC Circuit (Nigeria’s……

  • Case of the Day: LS Energia v. Corporation Electrica Nacional

    The case of the day is LS Energia Inc. v. Electrica Nacional S.A. (S. D. Fla. 2023). LS Energia, a Florida company, and its Panamanian affiliate brought an action against Venezuela and its state-owned oil and electric companies. The plaintiffs had begun by seeking to serve all three defendants by diplomatic channels under 28 U.S.C.……