This chapter delves into the question of the impact of extraterritorial and secondary sanctions on private contractual relations. It opens with a discussion of the characterisation of extraterritorial and secondary sanctions as potential legal or factual impediments to the performance of contractual obligations. A detailed analysis of the case law follows, bringing to the fore some degree of reluctance on the part of judicial authorities to allow operators to suspend the performance of their contractual obligations or to terminate contractual relations on account of their exposure to extraterritorial or secondary sanctions, at least in the absence of sanctions or force majeure contractual clauses. The chapter also explores the potential tension between such sanctions, on the one hand, and measures – commonly referred to as blocking statutes – enacted by states or by the EU to thwart their effects, on the other hand. A discussion, in this respect, of the relevant case law reveals a quest for a balance between policy objectives and economic soundness and shows the existence of incongruent views on the compatibility of sanctions clauses with blocking statutes.

National courts are central actors in the EU legal system. In a system of remedies against EU acts, they take on a filtering function. Comparatively few civil society actors – individuals, groups, or companies – have direct access to the EU courts. This chapter focuses on the autonomous role that national courts can and do take on in addressing alleged rights violations by the EU. The chapter explores how enterprising civil society actors seize on the ambiguities inherent in a multi-level jurisdiction with contested hierarchies. In focusing on such efforts, this chapter is less interested in doctrinal questions of how to resolve conflicts inherent in a pluralist legal order. Rather, it looks at the circumstances under which civil society litigants – individuals, groups, and companies – address a claim to a national court and where national courts have historically been open to such claims.

Chapter 10 provides an overview of the role and functions of private enforcement within regulatory regimes and the availability of redress. It draws attention to different ‘models of legal responsibility’ upon which regulatory regimes rely in allocating and distributing legal rights and duties between those who are subject to regulation and those whom regulation is intended to protect (‘regulatory beneficiaries’). This chapter is the most legally focused chapter in the volume, selectively highlighting several features of the institutional and enforcement context in which regulation occurs. Examples are private litigation, collective redress mechanisms, the role of courts as authoritative and final interpreters of the law and ‘alternative’ avenues for redress.

Chapter 2 examines the local context of the pueblo of El Cobre and its members’ response to the privatization of the mining estate and their ensuing enslavement. It probes the unorthodox character of this community and the villagers’ vernacular collective self-identification as “cobreros,” or natives of El Cobre, an identification that they pressed on the court to counter their captivity and make other claims. The bonds of pueblo towered over and above possible internal cleavages along formal free or slave status, class, race, and gender. The cobreros’ collective action was possible precisely because of their social bonds and (informal) organization as a pueblo. The community empowered Gregorio Cosme Osorio, one of their own, to be their apoderado or legal representative in the royal court in Madrid, a rare liaison position for a colonial racialized man and another extraordinary aspect of the case. The chapter then turns trans-local as it traces Cosme’s journey and the networks he created from El Cobre to Madrid to litigate collective freedom. The chapter also examines the financial, administrative, political, and social challenges that these colonial litigants faced in accessing the judicial arena, particularly at the imperial level.

This introduction to Section 4 of the volume on court judgements and related works discusses the nature of recent research on the subject and comments on the increased availability of primary sources (in the form of sijillāt) from the Ottoman period onwards, including a representative bibliography of recent scholarship on the subject.

Litigation is a complex matter, calling for more sophisticated inquiries than what can be measured by a binary variable, namely, whether or not a Chinese company had experienced US lawsuits. This dichotomy glosses over crucial aspects of Chinese companies’ interactions with the US adjudicatory system. For instance, while prominent Chinese companies such as Huawei have litigated hundreds of lawsuits in the United States, most others were involved in no more than a few cases. However, the coding in Chapter 4 grouped them together in terms of US litigation experience. In fact, those that litigate infrequently may have more in common with Chinese companies that have managed to avoid US lawsuits altogether than prominent repeat players. To unveil important information lost from collecting and coding the data as a binary variable and to ameliorate possible biases in survey data concerning sensitive topics, this chapter explores a hand-collected objective dataset: federal lawsuits involving Chinese companies. It also presents three detailed case studies to demonstrate how Chinese companies with direct investments in the United States navigate the complex host-state legal system. These case studies (i.e., Lenovo, Huawei, and Fuyao Glass) will revisit the hypotheses and findings of prior chapters.

This chapter examines laws governing witnesses at trial and their testimony as well as other rules related to legal procedure. It also looks at how these topics figure in a number of psalms and in prophetic literature, since the relationship of individuals and even entire nations to Yahweh is often depicted in legal terms.

Epic Games, the creator of the hugely popular computer game Fortnite described itself as an “interactive entertainment company and provider of 3D engine technology.” Tim Sweeney, while a mechanical engineering student at the University of Maryland, founded the company in 1991 under the name Potomac Computer Systems out of his parents’ home. In addition to games, Epic Games also created Unreal Engine, the 3D game creation tool that powered a large array of games and 3D design by film, TV, simulation, architecture, automotive, and manufacturing companies. Furthermore, Epic Online Services facilitated content development for a variety of platforms. Epic Game Store was a distribution channel for Epic’s in-house games and those by third-party developers. This case explores the network and platform strategies of Epic Games and finishes with a discussion of the lawsuit that the company filed against mobile platform providers Apple and Google.

In the early 1990s, when Texaco left its operation in Ecuador behind, the metamorphosis of the Ecuadorean Amazon into a polluted resource environment came to light, attracting the interest of national and international NGOs and causing global and tedious legal aftermath: In the famous case Aguinda v. Texaco, a group of affected indigenous people and settlers sued the oil corporation to compensate for the environmental and social damage done in the Amazon – with mixed results. The final section of the book is structured in a loosely juridical fashion: starting with the discussion of the evidence – a summary of the recent history of the region and how human–nature relationships changed in the twentieth century – the conclusion problematizes the unfolding of the global legal battle and the contradicting judgments it produced. As the legal pathway appears to not offer justice to the affected people, a closing statement calls for alternative solutions to the plight of the Amazon, locally and globally.

Profitability of digital innovations depends on the ability of the innovator to prevent imitation and control a bottleneck in the ecosystem. The main drivers of value in the markets for information and communication include the perceived inherent value of the information product or service itself and the size and structure of the network. This chapter focuses on how to protect and enhance the value of information.

Chapter 4 commences a survey of the Court of Requests’ litigants. Drawing data out of the entire Court archive, it charts the origins of cases and clients in counties across English-governed territories and the status identifiers ascribed to both petitioners and defendants. The demography of this Court is characterised by considerable geographical and social breadth; this was a truly ‘national’ tribunal, accessible to everyone from poor widows and humble craftsmen to civic officials and the landed classes. The chapter puts these findings into dialogue with the scholarship on the relative litigiousness of English regions and on wealth distribution in early modernity. Finally, the chapter tests the claim that Requests was the ‘poor man’s court’, asking whether we can identify truly impoverished individuals among the standard social categorisations appearing in court records. It argues that royal justice could serve litigants of more humble status, though this observation will be qualified in following chapters.