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Page Number: 9

6 

WATER SPLASH, INC. v. MENON 

Opinion of the Court 

that it lacks any plausible textual footing in Article 10.2 

If the drafters wished to limit Article 10(a) to a particu­
lar subset of documents, they presumably would have said 
so—as they did, for example, in Article 15, which refers to
“a writ of summons or an equivalent document.”  Instead, 
Article  10(a)  uses  the  term  “judicial  documents”—the
same  term  that  is  featured  in  10(b)  and  10(c).  Accord-
ingly, the notion that Article 10(a) governs a different set of
documents  than  10(b)  or  10(c)  is  hard  to  fathom.  And  it 
certainly  derives  no  support  from  the  use  of  the  word
“send,”  whose  ordinary  meaning  is  broad  enough  to  cover 
the  transmission  of  any  judicial  documents  (including
litigation-initiating  documents).    Nothing  about  the  word
“send”  suggests  that  Article  10(a)  is  narrower  than  10(b)
and  10(c),  let  alone  that  Article  10(a)  is  somehow  limited 
to “post-answer” documents. 

Ultimately,  Menon  wishes  to  read  the  phrase  “send
judicial  documents”  as  “serve  a  subset  of  judicial  docu­
ments.”  That is an entirely atextual reading, and Menon 
offers  no  sustained  argument  in  support  of  it.  Therefore, 
the  only  way  to  escape  the  conclusion  that  Article  10(a)
includes  service  of  process  is  to  assert  that  it  does  not 
cover  service  of  documents  at  all—and,  as  shown  above, 
that reading is structurally implausible and renders Arti­
cle 10(a) superfluous. 

—————— 

2 The argument also assumes that the scope of the Convention is not 

limited to service of process (otherwise, Article 10(a) would be superflu­
ous even under Menon’s reading).  Schlunk can be read to suggest that 
this  assumption  is  wrong.   486  U. S.,  at  700–701;  see  1  B.  Ristau, 
International  Judicial  Assistance  §4–1–4(2),  p.  112  (1990  rev.  ed.)
(Ristau)  (stating  that  the  English  term  “service”  in  the  Convention 
“means the formal delivery of a legal document to the addressee in such
a  manner  as  to  legally  charge  him  with  notice  of  the  institution  of  a 
legal proceeding”).  For the purposes of this discussion, we will assume, 
arguendo, that Menon’s assumption is correct.