Editor's Comments

• Publication year: 2015

EDITOR'S COMMENTS

This issue of The California International Law Journal is devoted to the insights of leading practitioners, jurists, and academics on some of today's most pressing and intriguing international legal issues.

In the Practitioner's Spotlight, Dorian Daley, the General Counsel of Oracle Corporation, shares tips for leading a global legal team, the key international legal issues facing Oracle, and her views on international arbitration.

Jeff Bleich, the former Ambassador to Australia and past State Bar President, and Aimee Feinberg, a Deputy Solicitor General in the California Department of Justice, address the California Supreme Court's recent correction of an 1890 decision denying bar membership to the first Chinese lawyer in America. They eloquently explain how the reckoning with that past injustice "positions U.S. Courts to communities around the world as a place where every litigant can expect equal protection . . . regardless of national origin."

The question of equal treatment of foreign parties is at the core of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the proposed trade pact that undergirds President Obama's "Asia pivot." Articles by Ko-Yung Tung, former General Counsel of the World Bank, and Robert Bowen, Associate General Counsel at Western Digital Corporation, provide an advanced playbook on potential legal ramifications of the twelve-country agreement, which is in the final stages of negotiation.

From questions of trade equality, we turn to the issue of whether, and how, courts should use foreign legal authorities to decide domestic matters. Laura Heiman, who co-authored an insightful amicus brief in Lozano v. Montoya-Alvarez, dissects this under-the-radar case in which all nine Supreme Court justices agreed on the need to examine the decisions of foreign courts to interpret an international treaty.

Our editor M. Bob Kao, along with Judge Chen-Chou Hsu of the Taiwan High Court, then visit the distant corners of the Taiwanese criminal courts. From a study of...