What's a reasonable venue for legal action?

Stephen Withers
Monday, 31 March 2008 11:57

Opinion and Analysis

Jurisdiction is a funny thing.

A few years ago, Australian courts ruled that businessman Joseph Gutnick was able to sue Dow Jones for libel in that country as 'publication' was deemed to have occurred where the Barron's Online online article was read, not in the US where the server was located.

In late 2007, TorrentSpy resisted a US court order apparently on the grounds that it was located outside of the US and that the order was inconsistent with international law. Regardless, TorrentSpy shuttered its operations last week.

And now we have a pair of individuals trying to use the US courts to block the commissioning of CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is located on the Swiss-French border.

Walter Wagner and Luis Sancho of Hawaii are apparently concerned that the Collider could create microscopic black holes that combine and then suck in the planet, strangelets (a theoretical combination of quarks hypothesised to turn everything it contacts into more strangelets), or magnetic monopoles (which apparently might cause a vaguely similar chain reaction).

We'll leave it to commenters to slug out the issue of whether the LHC is at all likely to trigger any of these scenarios.