Abstract
Introduction: The United States is a member of international organizations whose business it is to negotiate private law conventions. The most prominent of these is the Hague Conference on Private International Law, but there are others including the Organization of American States (OAS), Unidroit and UNCITRAL. In recent years these organizations have paid increasing attention to the related problems of international judgment recognition and jurisdiction in civil matters.
The reasons for the increasing attention are multiple. The success of the 1958 New York Convention on International Arbitration - to which the United States has been a party since 1970 - allows relatively easy recognition of arbitration awards in the more than 100 signatory nations. The odd consequence is that while it is often difficult to obtain foreign recognition of an American judgment, it is often easy to obtain recognition of an American arbitration award. European success with the Brussels and Lugano Conventions has shown that judgments conventions can work regionally, stirring optimism that a transregional convention might succeed. Finally, and most importantly, the acceptance by the Hague Conference of the United States' proposal to negotiate a judgments convention has ensured that this task will be at the forefront of private law international efforts at least through the year 2001.
All of this leads me to the topic of this year's meeting of the Section on Conflict of Laws of the Association of American Law Schools, which is: "Could a Treaty Trump Supreme Court Jurisdictional Doctrine?" The topic is intentionally stated in a provocative fashion to call attention to one of the significant difficulties facing the United States in attempting to enter into any international judgments convention. That significant difficulty is the messy state of American jurisdiction.