Professor Dodge Files Amicus Brief with Supreme Court

Professor William S. Dodge has filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in Animal Science Products, Inc. v. Hebei Welcome Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., an antitrust case involving price fixing by Chinese companies. In the decision below, the Second Circuit held that the district court was bound to defer to the Chinese Government’s representations about Chinese law and was required to abstain from deciding the case on grounds of international comity. The Supreme Court granted cert limited to the question of whether a court is bound to defer to a foreign government’s representations about its own law. The amicus brief takes no position on the question presented but argues that, in answering the question, the Supreme Court should take care not to endorse the Second Circuit’s doctrine of abstention based on international comity because that doctrine conflicts with decisions of the Supreme Court and threatens to supplant other doctrines of international comity like foreign sovereign compulsion and the act of state doctrine.

Professor Dodge, Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law, is an influential international law scholar. He serves as a Co-Reporter for the American Law Institute's Restatement (Fourth) of Foreign Relations Law: Jurisdiction and as a member of the State Department's Advisory Committee on International Law. He is a co-author of the casebook Transnational Business Problems and a co-editor of International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court: Continuity and Change, which won the American Society of International Law's 2012 certificate of merit. He has authored more than 50 other publications in books and law reviews.

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