[This post was rendered moot on December 1, 2023 with the entry into force of the Hague Service Convention in Singapore. For updated procedures, simply click here.]
At the far south end of the Malay Peninsula lies a tiny city
I say all the time that we ain’t building rockets here. But we are communicating. And if your phone doesn’t work correctly, you have problems. The sturdiest cellphone I ever owned was a decade ago– in the pre-smartphone days. It was a
An interesting Catch-22 sometimes faces U.S. lawyers when they try to serve a complaint with punitive damages on a German defendant. Germany’s public policy disdains punitive damages– indeed, until recently (that is, until the last couple of decades), they didn’t even conceptualize punitives in
I say all the time that we aren’t building rockets here. But we are building a ship, and a leaky ship means that your people could not possibly reach North America from Europe. Do it the right way, and you’re the FIRST EUROPEANS TO REACH NORTH AMERICA. That’s right, I said it.
I hate to be the guy who breaks this to you, I said to the client, but there is no chance that you’ll be able to get that notice of hearing served in time. Not properly, anyway.
Poor fellow was a first-year associate, trying to get a notice of a guardianship hearing served on an
I say all the time that we aren’t building rockets here. But we are building a ship, and a leaky ship means that your people could not possibly reach North America from Europe. Do it the right way, and you’re the FIRST EUROPEANS TO REACH NORTH AMERICA. That’s right, I said it.
One of the funniest bits of homage I’ve ever seen is the Rugrats’ takeoff on the opening scene of The Godfather (see here, and giggle a bit). Says Tommy, channeling Bonasera the Undertaker: “I believe in the playground.
[Update, 2022: For a more academic view of this issue, see William S. Dodge, Substituted Service and the Hague Service Convention, 63 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1485 (2022).]
Two weeks ago, I posted that you can’t simply serve a U.S. subsidiary of a foreign company & get the parent on the hook in a lawsuit. For such an idea to work, your state’s public policy has to disregard the corporate veil. Only one state has done so– and under very limited circumstances. [That was Illinois, where they did it by statute– that I know of– and where the idea only pertains to Illinois subsidiaries. That’s how we got Schlunk, the seminal case in Hague Service Convention jurisprudence. No other state does it, that I know of.]
Another misconception seems to pop up from time to time: the thought that you can serve a foreign* corporation by delivery to the Secretary of State wherever the case is being heard because the Secretary is a statutory agent. Sorry, but it just ain’t so. When you do serve via the SoS, ask yourself, “what do they do with it?”Continue Reading You Can’t Simply Serve the Secretary of State
I say all the time that we aren’t building rockets here. But we are building a ship, and a leaky ship means that your people could not possibly reach North America from Europe. Do it the right way, and you’re the FIRST EUROPEANS TO REACH NORTH AMERICA. That’s right, I said it.
This space hasn’t offered much about the biggest news in transnational litigation in years– a test of the validity of service by mail under Article 10(a) of the Hague Service Convention. Frankly, the outcome doesn’t much
