Cornell Law Review

Note

Domesticating Comity: Territorial U.S. Discovery in Violation of Foreign Privacy Laws

Corby F. Burger

This Note aims to make two contributions. First, this Note addresses a series of threshold descriptive and normative questions that are mostly unaddressed by scholars, the Restatements of Foreign Relations Law, and the courts: Is the doctrine of foreign-state compulsion available to defend against a territorial discovery order or is the foreign-state compulsion defense limited to extraterritorial acts? How have courts applied the doctrine to territorial discovery, if at all? Should the foreign-state compulsion defense be territorially limited? Second, if the foreign-state compulsion defense is available to defend against a territorial discovery order, how do courts account for the fact that the information is presently located in the United States when applying the doctrine? Should courts account for the present location of ESI, and, if so, how much weight should the present location of data be given in a court’s analysis?

Jan 2020