Heads I Win, Tails you Lose: The Illusory "Option" of Montreal Convention Article 33(1) in West Caribbean Airways
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 2005 crash of West Caribbean Airways flight 708 sparked an international debate over where plaintiffs can bring suit under the 1999 Montreal Convention. U.S. and French courts have issued increasingly acrimonious decisions; scholars have written articles in support of each competing interpretation of the Montreal Convention; and, for nearly ten years, the West Caribbean plaintiffs have waited to receive compensation for the loss of their loved ones. Both the 1929 Warsaw Convention and the 1999 Montreal Convention, the two main treaties governing carrier liability for international commercial aviation, provide that the procedural rules of the forum country will apply to actions brought under either treaty. For years, U.S. courts hearing Warsaw Convention cases have applied the procedural doctrine of forum non conveniens (FNC) to dismiss cases to other States. However, until the West Caribbean case it was an open question whether U.S. courts could apply FNC under the Montreal Convention. In West Caribbean, U.S. courts applied FNC under the Montreal Convention and dismissed the case to France. French courts then refused to hear the case for want of jurisdiction, thus depriving the plaintiffs of both their preferred fora. The case has created a legal quagmire for both the West Caribbean plaintiffs and future Montreal Convention litigants. This paper argues that the West Caribbean plaintiffs' claims should have been heard in the United States and concludes with a call to insert a dispute resolution provision in the Montreal Convention to address future disputes.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.001 |
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".