Asst. Prof. of Law Yanbai Andrea Wang presented her article, “Enforcing Foreign Judgments in the New Global Rivalry.”
Assistant Professor of Law Yanbai Andrea Wang was accepted to the 2024 Harvard/Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum, held this past June at Stanford Law School.
Wang’s article, “Enforcing Foreign Judgments in the New Global Rivalry,” was chosen along with 10 other junior faculty’s work from across the country through a double-blind selection process by a jury of accomplished scholars.
In the article, Wang argues that the landscape of transnational litigation is under transformation due to the rise of China and Chinese civil procedure. She explains this transformation through the lens of one key doctrine: the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments.
Based on the first systematic binational study of judgment enforcement practice within the U.S.-China dyad, Wang shows evidence of concurrent trends toward greater cooperation and greater conflict.
“Cooperation is growing in a set of cases I call ‘singular’ litigation enforcement requests—those in which litigation occurred in one country and enforcement is sought in the other,” said Wang.
In the United States, Wang says singular requests are primarily litigated in state courts and serve Chinese citizens pursuing other Chinese citizens who have moved their assets to the United States, usually in the form of real estate.
Wang shows conflict occurring in another set of cases she calls “parallel” litigation enforcement requests, or those in which litigation occurred in both countries. Wang explains that in parallel requests, enforcement of one country’s judgment is sought to influence or terminate related litigation in the other country, typically through intersystem preclusion. In the United States, parallel requests are primarily litigated in federal courts and serve corporations. Unlike singular requests, parallel requests often implicate areas of conflicting sovereign interest.
“These two faces of judgment enforcement reflect the economic relationship between the U.S. and China—equal parts dependency and competition,” said Wang. “They portend a new set of international procedural dynamics characterized by jurisdictional contestation and the increasing prominence of doctrines that regulate parallel litigation.”
Each year, the Harvard/Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum invites junior scholars for the selective honor to present their work to an audience of fellow honorees and senior faculty from the host institutions to “promote in-depth discussion on the selected papers and more general reflections on broader methodological issues, as well as to foster a stronger sense of community among American legal scholars,” especially by reinforcing ties between new and more experienced professors.
Over the course of the two-day Forum, Wang received substantive feedback and mentorship from fellow presenters and legal scholars.
“Their perspectives helped me sharpen my article’s conceptual underpinnings and frame its broader significance,” said Wang. “’Enforcing Foreign Judgments in the New Global Rivalry’ is the first of several pieces in which I investigate the relationship between U.S. and Chinese courts. Participating in the Forum at this early stage of my research agenda has really informed the broader trajectory of my work as a whole.”