Professor Dodge Files Amicus Brief with Supreme Court in International Comity Case

On April 11, Professor William S. Dodge filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to address the question whether a court may abstain on a case-by-case basis from applying federal antitrust law on grounds of international comity. The Second Circuit relied on a doctrine of prescriptive comity abstention to reverse a $147 million antitrust judgment against Chinese companies for fixing the price of vitamin C sold into the United States. The Second Circuit’s decision relies on the kind of multi-factor balancing test that the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected as an approach to extraterritoriality over the past two decades. As Dodge has noted in a recent blog post, the decision also charts a course for foreign countries to immunize their companies from U.S. antitrust liability by requiring them to coordinate prices and filing amicus briefs.

Professor Dodge is Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law and John D. Ayer Chair in Business Law at UC Davis School of Law. He is a leading expert on international law, international transactions, and international dispute resolution and a founding editor of the Transnational Litigation Blog (TLB). He served as Counselor on International Law to the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State from 2011 to 2012 and as a reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement (Fourth) of Foreign Relations Law from 2012 to 2018. Professor Dodge is a co-author of Transnational Business Problems and Transnational Litigation in a Nutshell, 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 70 other publications in books and law reviews.