What's a reasonable venue for legal action?

Stephen Withers
Monday, 31 March 2008 12:57

Opinion and Analysis

But Wagner and Sancho have brought their case in a US court. Wouldn't it have been more reasonable to bring the case in either France or Switzerland, given that's where the LHC is located?

CERN apparently thinks so. The New York Times quotes James Gillies, head of communications at CERN, as saying "It's hard to see how a district court in Hawaii has jurisdiction over an intergovernmental organisation in Europe."

The same article notes that Wagner filed similar suits against the Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in 1999 and 2000, but they were dismissed in 2001. The collider has been operating without incident.