International transactions present unique legal risks. When a contract touches several different nations, a party may not know where it will be called upon to defend a lawsuit or, alternatively, which nation’s law will be applied to resolve that dispute. To mitigate these risks, parties will...

Slowly but surely, international trade agreements have disappeared from U.S. courts. This Essay provides a concise historical account of this disappearance--which it calls the ‘‘Great Vanishing’’--and explains how and why it came to pass. It first describes how the Trade Preferences Act...

the past decade, there has been an explosion in seed financing for early-stage technology startups. Increasingly, this seed financing is channeled to these companies via an entirely new form of investment contract — the deferred equity agreement. One version of this agreement — the Simple...

In their wide-ranging and thought-provoking article, A Market for Sovereign Control, Joseph Blocher and Mitu Gulati argue that territorial sovereignty is a commodity that can and should be subject to market forces. In this Response, I first identify the two different types of deals — friendly...

In an earlier era, treaties of Friendship, Commerce, and Navigation (FCNs) were the primary international law mechanism through which the U.S. government sought to promote and protect foreign investment. Conventional wisdom holds that FCNs are of only limited historical interest, having been...

Who is bound by a forum selection clause? At first glance, the answer to this question may seem obvious. It is black-letter law that a person cannot be bound to an agreement without her consent. In recent years, however, courts have not followed this rule with respect to forum selection clauses....

Scholars have long debated the criteria that U.S. courts should use when deciding whether to recognize and enforce money judgments rendered by foreign courts. One of the proposed criteria — reciprocity — would require proof that the rendering court would enforce a U.S. judgment if the...