05 International Litigation and Alternative Dispute Resolutions
Regularly, people don’t just want to have rights, they also want to enforce their rights. By the latter, we understand the term «litigation» in this chapter as the process of resolving disputes through the court system, where parties bring a case before a judge to obtain a legally binding decision. However, the term here does not only cover enforcement in state courts, but the whole way there, including negotiation with an opposing party and the alternatives to litigation in a state court, the Alternative Dispute Resolutions. This already here: a court case is the worst case, which must be prevented in the case of legal disagreements!
A legal dispute is international if one of the parties is from another country.
The first questions in an international legal dispute are the applicable law and the place/court of jurisdiction. In contracts, these issues should be explicitly regulated by the parties. If they do not do so, the issues must be determined through so-called national collision laws or international intergovernmental agreements. The second is suboptimal (!).
05 International Litigation and Alternative Dispute Resolutions