Assuming Regulatory Authority for Transnational Torts: An Interstate Affair? A Historical Perspective on the Canadian Private International Law Tort Rules
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Tolofson v. Jensen, the Supreme Court of Canada determined that in most cases the law of the place where the tort occurred has exclusive authority to regulate all legal aspects related to it. In developing this choice of law rule, the Supreme Court relied on an analogy between Private International Law and Public International law. This allows Private International Law to claim a structural, neutral function in the distribution of legislative authority in the international realm and to ignore both private law and public law considerations. To best reveal the way in which the Supreme Court injected these limitations into Private International Law by reference to Public International Law, I show the striking similarity between the Supreme Court’s reasoning and several Private International Law writings at the end of the 19th century in Continental Europe. \n\nIn the context of the extraterritorial tortious activity of multinational corporations, these limitations make Private International Law oblivious to arguments of Corporate Social Responsibility scholars showing that a multinational corporation may legitimately be regulated by the state of its headquarters, even for extraterritorial conduct. Overall, I argue that an overemphasis on legislative authority as a symbol of state sovereignty transforms Private International Law matters generally, and transnational torts in particular, in inter-state affairs, removed from the interests and pleas of the individuals and communities affected by them. \n\n \n\nDans l’arrêt Tolofson c. Jensen, la Cour suprême du Canada a décidé que, dans la plupart des cas, la loi du lieu où le délit a été commis régit exclusivement tous les aspects juridiques qui s’y rapportent. Pour établir cette règle du choix de la loi applicable, la Cour suprême s’est fondée sur une analogie entre le droit international privé et le droit international public. Cela permet au droit international privé de réclamer une fonction structurelle et neutre au niveau de la distribution du pouvoir législatif dans le domaine international et d’ignorer tant les considérations de droit privé que les considérations de droit public. Pour mieux illustrer la façon dont la Cour suprême a inséré de telles restrictions dans le droit international privé par renvoi au droit international public, je démontre la similitude frappante entre le raisonnement de la Cour suprême et de nombreux écrits en droit international privé à la fin du 19e siècle en Europe continentale. \n\nDans le contexte des activités délictueuses extraterritoriales des sociétés multinationales, de telles restrictions rendent le droit international privé insensible aux arguments des universitaires prônant la responsabilité sociale des entreprises selon lesquels une société multinationale peut légitimement être régie par l’État où est situé son siège social, même pour sa conduite extraterritoriale. Dans l’ensemble, je fais valoir qu’une trop grande importance accordée au pouvoir législatif comme symbole de la souveraineté étatique transforme les affaires relevant du droit international privé en général et les délits transnationaux en particulier en affaires interétatiques qui ne tiennent pas compte des intérêts et demandes des particuliers et collectivités qu’elles touchent.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".