Back to the Future with Sovereignty:
Extraterritorial Regulation as a Source of Rules in Global Governance
Dr. Tonya L. Putnam
Prepared for Presentation at
American Political Science Association Annual Meeting
September 1-4, 2005, Washington D.C.
Please send comments to ## email not listed ##
Who makes the rules in the international system when private conduct crosses
international borders? Regulating private transactions across international boundaries has
long posed a profound challenge to states in the international system. This is because the
geographical reach of many types of private conduct far exceeds the territorially-bound
public law available to regulate it. Countries also frequently differ regarding the legal
limits (if any) they place on various types of conduct making coordination difficult.
Extraterritorial regulation by domestic courts has emerged as one mechanism by which
states manage the conduct of transnational actors—albeit unilaterally, and often
according to the rules and standards of the regulating state.
U.S. courts, for example, have applied domestic statutes extraterritorially to break
up international trade cartels; to punish international terrorism suspects; to grant
compensation to the families of victims of torture ordered by foreign military officials; to
seize foreign ships on the high seas and prosecute their crews for conspiracy to import
illegal narcotics into the United States; to impose restrictions on the re-export of
sensitive materials and technologies; to protect U.S. trademarks from foreign
infringement; and to protect migratory species. At the same time, U.S. courts have
generally declined to enforce U.S. statutes extraterritorially to punish violations of
product liability laws; to secure compensation for American citizens killed in foreign
plane crashes; to punish violations of U.S. patents abroad; or to require compliance with
labor and environmental standards. This paper uses statistical methods in combination
with qualitative process-tracing to explain variation in U.S. courts’ willingness to find
and exercise jurisdiction over transnational disputes with an extraterritorial ‘center of
1
Page 1 of 41 
Convention