Water Splash: The Denouement

In Water Splash v. Menon, 137 S. Ct. 1504 (2017), the Supreme Court finally resolved the question of whether Article 10(a) of the Hague Service Convention permits service of process by postal channels (it does). That’s the end of the story for Letters Blogatory readers, but it wasn’t the end of the story for the litigants. As I had hoped, the Court was careful in its decision to note that Article 10 permits, but does not itself authorize, service of process by postal channels. The Court remanded the case to the Texas Supreme Court for a decision on whether the service by mail in the case was authorized by Texas law.
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Case of the Day: Water Splash v. Menon

The case of the day is Water Splash v. Menon (S. Ct. 2017). The Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, put to rest the circuit split about whether Article 10(a) of the Hague Service Convention permits service of process by mail. Happily, the state and federal courts in the United States are all now on the same page with the Special Commission of the Hague Conference, the US State Department, most if not all foreign courts, and more or less all writers on the subject: Article 10(a) does indeed permit service by mail.
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Water Splash: Reaction to the Oral Argument

Here is the transcript of the oral argument in the Water Splash case. Nothing in the transcript makes me want to revise the view I gave earlier this week about the likely outcome of the case. It still seems likely to me that the case will come out in the petitioner’s favor, and my best guess is that it’s a unanimous decision.
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Water Splash: My Prediction

Okay, one last thought on the Water Splash case, which is being argued tomorrow. My skill at prediction has proved poor again this year during the NCAA tournament, but maybe I can do a little better in predicting the outcome of this case. After all, there are at most nine possible vote totals in the case, while there are 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 possible basketball brackets!
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Water Splash v. Menon: The Respondent’s Brief

The respondent has filed her brief in Water Splash v. Menon, the case on Article 10(a) of the Hague Service Convention. I am not going to comment at length on the details of the brief. May I gently suggest that if you’re talking about Plato’s theory of forms or John Finnis on natural law in a brief on treaty interpretation, something has gone wrong somewhere.
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Water Splash: Notes on Volkswagen from the new ABA Treatise

The publication of the new ABA treatise, which I noted yesterday, reminded me that I had already written about the question I noted last month in my discussion of the government’s amicus brief in the Water Splash case, namely whether the Hague Service Convention applies to all judicial documents, or just to the summons and complaint. Here is a short excerpt from my chapter in the new book, without the footnotes.
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Water Splash v. Menon: Two Briefs

The first two briefs are on file in Water Splash v. Menon, the Supreme Court case on the interpretation of Article 10(a) of the Hague Service Convention. First is the petitioner’s brief, of course, and there’s also an amicus brief from the United States in support of the petitioner’s view.
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Water Splash v. Menon: The Question Presented Calls For Caution

In Water Splash v. Menon, the Supreme Court will resolve the longstanding circuit split about whether Article 10(a) of the Hague Service Convention allows service of process by mail. As I noted in my post on Multisports USA v. TheHut.com, there’s a difficulty in the way the question on cert. has been presented. The question, as it appears in the petition, is: “Does the Hague Service Convention authorize service of process by mail?” The key word, the problematic word, is “authorize.” The question presented in the case is whether Article 10(a) has anything at all to do with service of process by mail or whether it only applies to service of documents other than the summons or other process. But the word “authorized” raises an entirely different question, on which there is also a (possible) circuit split but which is not part of the case before the court.
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Case of the Day: Multisports USA v. TheHut.com

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The case of the day is Multisports USA v. The Hut.com Ltd. (S.D. Fla. 2016). Multisports sued TheHut.com Ltd., a UK company, for tortious interference in business relationships. The claim was that The Hut.com had tortiously interfered in Multisports’ relationship with Compressport, for which it acted as exclusive US distributor of sports merchandise. Multisports attempted to serve process on TheHut.com by mail, apparently sent by Multisports or its lawyers rather than by the clerk. TheHut.com moved to dismiss for insufficient service of process.
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