Foreign Law in the English Courts - Matthew Chapman, 1 Chancery Lane
09/04/16. A number of the English lawyers who conduct PI litigation in cross-border cases have warned that the full implications of the Rome II Regulation (864/2007) – and the impact that it has on the assessment of damages awarded to English Claimants by English Judges – have yet to be felt. By way of recap, Rome II provides (in Article 15(c)) that once the applicable law of the tort has been identified it will apply (among other things) to the existence, the nature and the assessment of the damages to which the Claimant is entitled. In other words, (and by contrast to the previous position under the Private International Law (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1995) Rome II extends the reach of the foreign applicable law beyond the identification of heads of recoverable loss and into the assessment of damages process itself. This means a much greater role for foreign legal experts in the English Courts and it also means that English Judges may find themselves confronting (on a regular basis, given the volume of EU RTA claims in the English jurisdiction) vexed foreign law issues which have not been clearly resolved in the foreign jurisdiction from which they derive.
In this sense, an English Judge may be called to determine (if you like “to make”) German/French/Lithuanian (delete as appropriate) law. Soole J confronted a dilemma of just this kind in the very recent case of...
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