Description

“Legal hubs” is a multi-sited para-ethnographic study of sub-national jurisdictions of dispute resolution that are changing the nature of international business transactions. Just as tax havens are a response to tax law, so, too, are legal hubs a result of conflicts of law concerns, both domestic and inter-state, specifically, jurisdiction, choice of law, and enforcement of foreign judgments and domestic and foreign arbitral awards. Critically, legal hubs provide greater “liquidity” of procedural rules between and among different mechanisms of dispute resolution, including international arbitration, international commercial litigation, and business mediation. Legal hubs are an artefact of the British Empire, and adapt English common law procedural rules. Paradoxically, English common law innovations operate within non-liberal states, and thus raise important questions for the legal transplant literature. Further, legal hubs adjust to changes to international private law regimes from protectionist measures in the U.S., U.K., and Europe to increasing Chinese investment and trade. The project thus maps out this emergent terrain to argue that legal hubs are engines of legal globalization in a period of anti-globalization.

About The Speaker

Matthew S. Erie (J.D., Ph.D.) is an Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Studies and Associate Research Fellow of the Socio-Legal Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. Professor Erie’s interdisciplinary work stimulates conversations between law and anthropology to study the procedural aspects of domestic and cross-border commercial dispute resolution. In particular, he investigates the emergence and reconciliation of conflicts of law and normative pluralism in the course of increasing intersections of non-liberal values and Anglo-American common law.