Significance of Jurisdiction in balancing consumers and the industries
Harmonizing substantive laws would be a more direct way for striking the balance.
Predictability will be still improved by adopting a set of uniform rules on Jurisdiction.
Notes:
To ensure reliable and stable legal systems that sustain the fruits of E-Commerce for both consumers and the industries , what can be done by jurisdiction, which is our present issue to be discussed?
As all of you are aware, jurisdiction is a matter of choice of forum at least in a civil procedure.
You may as well think that harmonizing substantive laws would be a more direct way for striking the balance between consumers and the industries.
But as all of you are aware, in many cases, harmonizing substantive laws must be a long and winding road, which may not have the destination after all.
Therefore, adopting a set of uniform rules on jurisdiction must make sense in that predictability in international commerce will be improved, which leads to sound development of E-Commerce.
In addition to that, I think it also important to ensure predictable and reasonable extraterritorial application of public or administrative laws such as antitrust law or consumer protection law or financial regulations, which is related to prescriptive jurisdiction, or enforcement jurisdiction to some extent.
I am afraid that I won’t have time to deal with this issue today, but I have to say that Japan has been too shy on this matter and now is the time to reconsider reasonable ways of extraterritorial application of these rules
But I must add hastily that we are quite doubtful of unilateral application of a State pulic law in foreign countries without any agreement especially on enforcement in advance.
One of the practical ways is to enter into an bilateral agreement, which was already made , for example, with the U.S. Government on Antitrust implementation.