Opinion ID: 433759
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Promotion of International Comity

Text: 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