POST NUMBER 7328 JANUARY 2013SHOE-DROPPING & INCREMENTAL LEGAL PROGRESS ON A CASE-SPECIFIC BASIS Whether the subject is weather-prediction

or political prognostication or chemical analysis, having empirical data points is critical to acquiring even an approximate notion of where things are heading, much less where they instantaneously are at. The second item in that that short catalog includes the genuine wild-card posed when there is an human factor. Which is in significant part why the common law largely eschews scientific pretensions and, as Associate Justice Holmes so famously expressed it, pursues life and truth as seen though the scope of experience rather than logic. This reality also results in the paucity of consistency in procedural as well as substantive rules across legal and political systems. In Post Number 50 (24 September 2012), a brightly dangling question was presented regarding how Russia, its civil law legal system, and its judiciary would respond to public and private market forces pressing upon it coming especially from common law jurisdictions. A gauntlet had been verbally thrown down at the Second International Legal Forum in St. Petersburg in May see Post Number 23 (22 May 2012). Further words, if not actions, were anticipated at the Moscow gathering of the ABA international law section see again Post 50 (24 September 2012). Looking at what the Supreme Arbitrazh Court, in fact, decided during the summer and autumn of 2012 has prompted several international law firm and the London Financial Times to identify a June 2012 decision that was only published in September as fitting with the criticism expressed and action promised at the St. Petersburg forum by that courts President Anton Aleksandrovich Ivanov see (http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=074fd770-6f54-4680-8b1d6f713ceebef5) & (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/64459c78-3eec-11e2-87bc00144feabdc0.html). In the legal dispute between Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications Rus LLC and the Russian Telephone Company, a (decision, decree, opinion, resolution; see Post Number Three [12 February 2012]) was published on behalf of the presidium on 01 September 2012, albeit dated 19 June 2012 (http://arbitrations.ru/userfiles/file/Case%20Law/Enforcement/Sony_Ericsson_Russian_ Telephone_Company_Supreme_Court.pdf). An English translation may be found at (http://arbitrations.ru/userfiles/file/Case%20Law/Enforcement/Sony_Ericsson_Russian_ Telephone_Company_Supreme_Court%20eng.pdf). The dispute involves a complex international financing agreement including a clause giving one party an unilateral legal right to choose the venue for litigation to recover amounts that are due and owing. In the real world, which so regularly confounds fiction, the validity of the very same kind of clauses have been reviewed by the French Cour de Cassation and found wanting. The presidium took into account justice as fairness in commercial transactions as well as judicial processes including, for example, the 1950 European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights plus several decisions of the European Court of Human Rights interpreting as well as applying it. The denouement has not yet been played-out in the case at hand but President Ivanov and the Russian Supreme Arbitrazh Court would seem to be following-up on their earlier expressed concerns about the nominal over-reach of other legal regimes on the sovereignty of the Russia in a rather considered, reasoned, and thoughtful manner.