In his 1964 Hague lectures, F.A.

Mann sketched out the foundation of modern

Jurisdictional Law in the following terms:

Jurisdiction is an aspect of sovereignty, it is coextensive with and, indeed,

incidental to, but also limited by, the State's sovereignty. As Lord Macmillan said,
"it is an essential attribute of the sovereignty of this realm, as of all sovereign
independent States, that it should possess jurisdiction over all persons and things
within its territorial limits and in all cases, civil and criminal, arising within these
limits". If a State assumed jurisdiction outside the limits of its sovereignty, it
would come into conflict with other States which need not suffer any encroachment
upon their own sovereignty... Such a system seems to establish a satisfactory regime
for the whole world. It divides the world into compartments within each of which a
sovereign State has jurisdiction. Moreover, the connection between jurisdiction and
sovereignty is, up to a point, obvious, inevitable, and almost platitudinous, for to
the extent of its sovereignty a State necessarily has jurisdiction.1

This passage captures the triangular relationship of three concepts: territory,

sovereignty, and jurisdiction. Statehood is articulated by reference to a particular
geographic territory; jurisdiction, in the sense of a sovereign's authority over persons or
events, by reference to their location within that territory. This model long served as the
basis for rules on legislative, or prescriptive, jurisdiction. The factual links between
particular conduct and a given territory, or between the effects of that conduct and a
given territory, determined a state's lawmaking authority over the conduct.

In the current era, the reliance on territorial factors in determining the scope of a
country's legislative jurisdiction has been called into question. This is due primarily to
the increasing complexity and diffusion of the transactions and events that trigger
jurisdictional inquiry. Regulators and courts must grapple not only with cross-border
transactions, or with acts of multinational enterprises, but also with events that can be
characterized as occurring nowhere (in cyberspace) or everywhere (on interconnected
global markets). The resulting gaps and overlaps in transnational regulation have led
scholars working in a variety of substantive areas to propose alternative methods of
regulating cross-border commerce-methods that reject territorial contacts as the basis
for allocating regulatory jurisdiction. For instance, in the area of securities regulation

1
Frederick A. Mann, The Doctrine of Jurisdiction in International Law, 111 RECUEIL DES COURS 1, 30 (1964-I)
and insolvency, some authors have advocated increased deference to party autonomy,
arguing that companies should be free to choose the