Questions of recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments have entered center
stage. Recent empirical work suggests that there has been a marked increase in the frequency
with which U.S. courts are asked to recognize and enforce foreign judgments.
The U.S.
litigation surrounding a multibillion-dollar Ecuadoran judgment against Chevron indicates that
the stakes in some of these cases can be high indeed. Conversely, we learn that U.S. injunctions
in patent cases, an area where enforcement abroad is likely to be particularly tricky, nevertheless
include a substantial number of cases in which U.S. judgments will need to be recognized and
enforced abroad to be effective.
Although we do not know for sure, the same may well be true
of U.S. judgments in subject-matter areas other than patent law. This rising importance of
questions of judgments recognition has not been lost on lawmakers. In November of 2011, the
Subcommittee on Courts, Commercial and Administrative Law of the U.S. House of
Representatives’ Judiciary Committee held hearings on whether to adopt federal legislation on
the question of recognizing and enforcing foreign judgments in the United States. And at the