Opinion ID: 433759
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Judicial Interest Balancing

Text: 152 Even as the political branches of the respective countries have set in motion the legislative policies which have collided in this litigation, they have deprived courts of the ability meaningfully to resolve the problem. The American and English courts are obligated to attempt to reconcile two contradictory laws, each supported by recognized prescriptive jurisdiction, one of which is specifically designed to cancel out the other. 153 The suggestion has been made that this court should engage in some form of interest balancing, permitting only a reasonable assertion of prescriptive jurisdiction to be implemented. 143 However, this approach is unsuitable when courts are forced to choose between a domestic law which is designed to protect domestic interests, and a foreign law which is calculated to thwart the implementation of the domestic law in order to protect foreign interests allegedly threatened by the objectives of the domestic law. 144 Interest balancing in this context is hobbled by two primary problems: (1) there are substantial limitations on the court's ability to conduct a neutral balancing of the competing interests, and (2) the adoption of interest balancing is unlikely to achieve its goal of promoting international comity. 154
155 Most proposals for interest balancing consist of a long list of national contacts to be evaluated and weighed against those of the foreign country. These interests may be relevant to the desirability of allocating jurisdiction to a particular national forum. However, their usefulness breaks down when a court is faced with the task of selecting one forum's prescriptive jurisdiction over that of another. 156 Many of the contacts to be balanced are already evaluated when assessing the existence of a sufficient basis for exercising prescriptive jurisdiction. 145 Other factors, such as the extent to which another state may have an interest in regulating the activity, and the likelihood of conflict with regulation by other states 146 are essentially neutral in deciding between competing assertions of jurisdiction. Pursuing these inquiries only leads to the obvious conclusion that jurisdiction could be exercised or that there is a conflict, but does not suggest the best avenue of conflict resolution. These types of factors are not useful in resolving the controversy. 157 Those contacts which do purport to provide a basis for distinguishing between competing bases of jurisdiction, and which are thus crucial to the balancing process, generally incorporate purely political factors which the court is neither qualified to evaluate comparatively nor capable of properly balancing. One such proposed consideration is the degree to which the desirability of such regulation [of restrictive practices] is generally accepted. 147 We doubt whether the legitimacy of an exercise of jurisdiction should be measured by the substantive content of the prescribed law. Moreover, although more and more states are following the United States in regulating restrictive practices, and even exercising jurisdiction based on effects within territory, 148 the differing English and American assessment of the desirability of antitrust law is at the core of the conflict. An English or American court cannot refuse to enforce a law its political branches have already determined is desirable and necessary. 158 The court is also handicapped in any evaluation of the existence of justified expectations that might be protected or hurt by the regulation in question. 149 In this litigation, whether the reliance of Laker and its creditors on United States antitrust laws is justified depends upon whether one accepts the desirability of United States anti-trust law. Whether the defendants could justifiably have relied on the inapplicability of United States law to their conduct alleged to have caused substantial effects in the United States is based on the same impermissible inquiry. The desirability of applying ambiguous legislation to a particular transaction may imply the presence or absence of legislative intent. However, once a decision is made that the political branches intended to rely on a legitimate base of prescriptive jurisdiction to regulate activities affecting foreign commerce within the domestic forum, the desirability of the law is no longer an issue for the courts. 159 The importance of regulation to the regulating state 150 is another factor on which the court cannot rely to choose between two competing, mutually inconsistent legislative policies. We are in no position to adjudicate the relative importance of antitrust regulation or nonregulation to the United States and the United Kingdom. It is the crucial importance of these policies which has created the conflict. A proclamation by judicial fiat that one interest is less important than the other will not erase a real conflict. 160 Given the inherent limitations of the Judiciary, which must weigh these issues in the limited context of adversarial litigation, we seriously doubt whether we could adequately chart the competing problems and priorities that inevitably define the scope of any nation's interest in a legislated remedy. This court is ill-equipped to balance the vital national interests of the United States and the [United Kingdom] to determine which interests predominate. 151 When one state exercises its jurisdiction and another, in protection of its own interests, attempts to quash the first exercise of jurisdiction it is simply impossible to judicially 'balance' these totally contradictory and mutually negating actions. 152 161 Besides the difficulty of properly weighing the crucial elements of any interest balancing formula, one other defect in the balancing process prompts our reluctance to adopt this analysis in the context of preservation of jurisdiction. Procedurally, this kind of balancing would be difficult, since it would ordinarily involve drawn-out discovery and requests for submissions by political branches. There was no time for this process in the present case. Either jurisdiction was protected or it was lost. It is unlikely that the employment of a hasty and poorly informed balancing process would have materially aided the district court's evaluation of the exigencies and equities of Laker's request for relief. 162
163 We might be more willing to tackle the problems associated with the balancing of competing, mutually inconsistent national interests if we could be assured that our efforts would strengthen the bonds of international comity. However, the usefulness and wisdom of interest balancing to assess the most reasonable exercise of prescriptive jurisdiction has not been affirmatively demonstrated. This approach has not gained more than a temporary foothold in domestic law. Courts are increasingly refusing to adopt the approach. 153 Scholarly criticism has intensified. 154 Additionally, there is no evidence that interest balancing represents a rule of international law. Thus, there is no mandatory rule requiring its adoption here, since Congress cannot be said to have implicitly legislated subject to these international constraints. 155 164 If promotion of international comity is measured by the number of times United States jurisdiction has been declined under the reasonableness interest balancing approach, then it has been a failure. Implementation of this analysis has not resulted in a significant number of conflict resolutions favoring a foreign jurisdiction. A pragmatic assessment of those decisions adopting an interest balancing approach indicates none where United States jurisdiction was declined when there was more than a de minimis United States interest. 156 Most cases in which use of the process was advocated arose before a direct conflict occurred when the balancing could be employed without impairing the court's jurisdiction to determine jurisdiction. 157 When push comes to shove, the domestic forum is rarely unseated. 158 165 Despite the real obligation of courts to apply international law and foster comity, domestic courts do not sit as internationally constituted tribunals. Domestic courts are created by national constitutions and statutes to enforce primarily national laws. 159 The courts of most developed countries follow international law only to the extent it is not overridden by national law. 160 Thus, courts inherently find it difficult neutrally to balance competing foreign interests. 161 When there is any doubt, national interests will tend to be favored over foreign interests. 162 This partially explains why there have been few times when courts have found foreign interests to prevail. 163 166 The inherent noncorrelation between the interest balancing formula and the economic realities of modern commerce is an additional reason which may underlie the reluctance of most courts to strike a balance in favor of nonapplication of domestic law. An assertion of prescriptive jurisdiction should ultimately be based on shared assessments that jurisdiction is reasonable. 164 Thus, international law prohibits the assertion of prescriptive jurisdiction unsupported by reasonable links between the forum and the controversy. 165 167 However, it does not necessarily follow, as the use of interest balancing as a method of choosing between competing jurisdictions assumes, that there is a line of reasonableness which separates jurisdiction to prescribe into neatly adjoining compartments of national jurisdiction. There is no principle of international law which abolishes concurrent jurisdiction. 166 Since prescriptive jurisdiction is based on well recognized state contacts with controversies, the reality of our interlocked international economic network guarantees that overlapping, concurrent jurisdiction will often be present. 167 There is, therefore, no rule of international law holding that a more reasonable assertion of jurisdiction mandatorily 168 displaces a less reasonable assertion of jurisdiction as long as both are, in fact, consistent with the limitations on jurisdiction imposed by international law. 169 That is the situation faced in this case: the territoriality and nationality bases of jurisdiction of the United Kingdom and the United States are both unimpeached. 168 In our federal system of parallel sovereign courts, several lines of cases recognize that prescriptive jurisdiction is often shared among several forums. 170 Those forums may participate in interforum compacts that provide a basis for allocating jurisdiction to one forum over another. 171 Similarly, the problems associated with overlapping bases of national taxation in international law are directly addressed by numerous bilateral and multilateral treaties rather than a judicially developed rule of exclusive jurisdiction grounded in a prioritization of the relative reasonableness of links between the state and the taxed entity. 172 Because we see no neutral principles on which to distinguish judicially the reasonableness of the concurrent, mutually inconsistent exercises of jurisdiction in this case, we decline to adopt such a rule here. 173