No, really. Story here:
So there is some precedent for applying foreign law – but might there not be some constitutional, First Amendment objection to applying what is essentially religious law in a civil suit in the U.S.?
Why don’t they just move the suit to an Afghan court? 
They probably don’t have the extensive judge-buying program in place there that they do here…
Uh, the company isn’t bringing the suit. The widows are.
asks ≠ demands, BG.
That aside, if the precedent is to use the laws of the country where the crash occurred, I don’t see what the big deal is. Most countries don’t have such a strict separation of church and state as is found in the US.
What if the country’s law is religiously based?
Consider two countries. One uses a variant of Napoleonic civil law; the second uses rabbinical courts and Talmudic law.
Now consider a set of facts that would permit a case filed in US federal court to be removed to the civil law country - which you acknowledge above has precedent.
Are you suggesting that the identical set of facts would not permit removal to the rabbinical courts and Talmudic law country?
Really? I’d kind of assume that Afghanistan would be the bargain bin of judicial shopping.
Are these the same guys who think it’s a terrible idea to have the actions of their employees in Iraq be judged by Iraqi law? :rolleyes:
In this case, the defendant wants Afghan law to apply because it doesn’t recognize vicarious liability. That means that the airline isn’t liable for its employees’ negligence. While the legal doctrine might be based on religious doctrine, it’s difficult to see this as a First Amendment case. The parties agree that the Restatement of Law, Second, Conflict of Laws applies to the dispute, and they are arguing about technical distinctions among the various rules and comments in that work. There’s nothing morally abhorrent about choosing one liablity rule over another.
Is there an escape hatch in cases where the presumptively applicable law offends the public policies of the forum? Sure. Does it apply here? Nobody is making that argument, and I doubt there’d be much to it if they did. It’s pretty unpersuasive to argue something like that based only on the idea that another set of laws is more advantageous to your client.
In English, please? 
To be fair, I don’t think they want their actions in Iraq judged by Iraqi or American law.
There’s an extra charge for that.
I was being facetious, obviously. It’s the widows who brought the suit in the first place, thus why Blackwater had no say in the venue. That’s more or less what they’re arguing now. They want shari’a law because, as Gfactor noted, there is no vicarious liability, which means they wouldn’t be liable for what happened to people in their employees’ care at the time of the deaths.
U.S. law makes an employer liable for damages caused by an employee’s negligence, at least under some circumstances. Shari’a law does not.
Which is why I said:
Courts choose which law to apply based on certain rules. The fact that the rules indicate that the laws of a jurisdiction apply does not mean the court is establishing a religion (which offends the First Amendment), even if the chosen law is based on a religion.
There are several sets of choice of law rules out there. The Restatement (Second) is one of them. Cases say that the Restatement (Second) is the correct set of rules to apply to the choice of law problem in this case. The parties do not dispute this.
Instead the parties are arguing about which rule applies–the one on torts, generally, or the one on vicarious liablity.
Vicarious liablity rules are just that–rules. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with a rule that says employers aren’t liable for their employees’ negligence. You could make a case that the smarter policy favors vicarious liability, but few choice of law rules are based on choosing the better rule of law.
There are rules about when courts may refuse to apply the laws of another jurisdiction, but they typically don’t hinge on whether the judge thinks the other jurisdiction’s law is dumb or backwards. A stronger showing must usually be made.
This is the part I was confused about - it is not mentioned in the original article.
I looked up the briefs. 
I’m pretty sure that’s illegal in both shari’a law and US law…without the wearer’s permission, at least.
Could you explain what the rules are for each, respectively?
It’s amusing that Blackwater and friends are in Afghanistan as an extension of the US military which itself is there to assert “Western Kick-ass-ification” which, ostensibly, includes implementing democracy and thus secularism.
And Blackwater is cool with that it, it seems, until it’s inconvenient. Then, Sharia Law is the higher order.
Or am I totally off base on that?