National Jurisdiction and Global Business Networks

This is an edited version of a lecture on the use of local litigation as an instrument of global regulation. It asks whether the increasingly global aspect of business networks, and of the harms those networks can cause, demands a reexamination of the paradigm that we use to articulate the role of national courts in the global arena. In addressing this question, the lecture borrows the concept of scalar analysis from the literature on political geography. It uses that concept to analyze the ways in which global economic misconduct is situated before the courts of one particular country, and to illuminate the political space that U.S. domestic courts occupy when – through the exercise of judicial and legislative jurisdiction – they assert regulatory control over events and conduct that cross geographic areas. It draws on examples from the areas of competition, insolvency, and securities enforcement. The lecture does not conclude that the global nature of business networks requires a correspondingly global view of jurisdiction in domestic courts, but simply that it requires a more textured view of those courts' sphere of engagement