Supreme Court of the Republic of Cyprus. Seksen iki yüz kırk beş, via Wikimedia Commons.

I say all the time that we aren’t building rockets here.  But we are building a ship of sorts, and a leaky vessel means the cargo may not make it to its destination.  Serving process in Cyprus is subject to the strictures of the Hague Service Convention, regardless of which U.S. or Canadian venue is hearing the matter.  Cyprus has a rather complicated history, even in recent decades– and the island has been divided between Greek and Turkish ethnicities in the south and northeast, respectively, since the 1960s and ’70s.  Though not as bitter as several decades ago, the division nonetheless remains, and service in the Turkish region may not be as straightforward as in the Greek.  The following focuses mainly on the Greek portion of Cyprus, although Greek and Turkish officials may cooperate to effect service on behalf of foreign applicants.

Continue Reading How to Serve Process in Cyprus (updated 2025)

NASA photo.

With all the America-First hype swirling about the country, it’s never been more important to remind lawyers that things simply don’t work over there the same way they work here.  Global commerce isn’t going away, folks.  Tariffs notwithstanding, we still need goods from abroad to carry on our daily lives, so it’s still critical to understand the ways in which foreign systems operate.  We still have to sell our stuff abroad, or our economy will collapse in short order.  We still have to get all the K-Pop we can absorb.

Continue Reading Things are different overseas. Get used to it.

Huawei’s leadership respond to Trump ban.

Big in the news of late:  Huawei and the Trump Administration’s ban.

Continue Reading Chinese Companies and the FSIA

Charles Evans Whittaker Federal Courthouse, KCMO. Voidxor, via Wikimedia Commons.

I took Civ Pro from a giant.

When I say giant, I mean in the figurative sense, because he’s only 5’7″ or so, but this diminutive fellow remains among the most talented and effective teachers I’ve ever had.  He inspired me to wear bow ties, and illustrated the myriad types of joinder with a shopping bag full of beanie babies (I’m not joking).*  I grasped counterclaims and cross claims and third party claims pretty quickly– about the only things I grasped quickly as a 1L– because of an effective teaching tool.

Continue Reading Notice pleading, y’all.

Fidel Castro arrives MATS Terminal, Washington, D.C., April 15, 1959. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Trump Administration has fully implemented Title III of the Helms-Burton Act, which allows suits to proceed in U.S. courts against companies that do business in Cuba and profit from the use of property expropriated after the 1959 Communist Revolution.  Earlier this year, I posted the following illustration of how such a suit plays out:

Continue Reading HELMS-BURTON TITLE III EFFECTIVE

Quito, Ecuador. Where Julian Assange is not. Diego Delso via Wikimedia Commons.

Last summer, service of process in a major case was effected via Twitter.  In Twitter Service Hits the Bigtime, I commented that such service was okay under FRCP 4(f)(3) because the more traditional means were foreclosed to the plaintiffs.  Wikileaks was on the hook, in the eyes of the S.D.N.Y.

Continue Reading Tough to get Assange despite arrest

Christchurch College, Oxford.

“Two things I know to be true:  there is no difference between good flan and bad flan, and there is no war in Albania.”

— William H. Macy as “CIA Agent Young” in Wag the Dog

A shameless plug there for one of my favorite movies. Not only was Macy the clueless CIA agent dressed down in Wag by Robert de Niro, but he was also clueless Oldsmobile salesman Jerry Lundegaard in another of my favorite movies, Fargo.  I have yet to see any episodes of Shameless, but any guy who can play clueless so well is… simply brilliant.  You just can’t pull off stupid unless you’re smart.  No, really.

Continue Reading Admissionsgate… if it involved Oxbridge or the Sorbonne

USS Cole, the ship at the heart of the suit. U.S. Navy photo.

Last fall, I posted “FSIA Service… it’s really not that difficult” following several very poorly titled articles describing the Trump Administration’s support of a foreign government’s argument in a sovereign immunity case.  Sudan had asserted that service on its Embassy in Washington was not appropriate under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, and the Department of Justice weighed in on Sudan’s side.  The outrage from both left and right irked the hell out of me.  But the knee-jerk, non-lawyer reaction from the left– my own people, for crying out loud– really set my teeth on edge.  Yesterday, logic won.

Continue Reading SCOTUS solidifies FSIA service logic

Credit Suisse, one of the biggest banks in Zurich.  Which is saying something.  Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons / “Zürich (CH), Paradeplatz — 2011 — 1381” / CC BY-SA 4.0

I’ve seen a huge spike lately in the number of divorce attorneys calling about serving subpoenas on offshore banks.  The routine story: Spouse A (usually the wife, but not always) has learned that Spouse B (usually the husband, but not always) has tucked a few thousand dollars into some offshore account, usually in one of several countries that are famous for stringent banking secrecy laws.  Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, and the Channel Islands are those that come to mind, but protecting depositors’ privacy is fairly universal in the industrialized world.  As such, the calls haven’t been limited to the famous banking havens.

Continue Reading Divorce, Money Hidden Offshore, and The Hague

1854 Grimms’ German Dictionary, via Wikimedia Commons

Here we go again.  I’ve written before in this space that, yes, counsel, you do have to translate that thing.

But resistance keeps coming up in the legal community:  “oh, come on, the defendant lived in Chicago* for twelve years– the guy speaks English!”

Perhaps, but he lives in Germany now, and you’re serving him there.  Germany requires translation into German, without regard to the defendant’s competence in English.

(Yet they continue to push.)

Continue Reading Translation: it’s not about the defendant!