The Rose Mary

A State may lawfully take property within its own territory, and other countries will normally give effect to that taking. This case supplies the limit on that recognition, and it is the one authority the paper gives on expropriatory legislation.

This course states the case for its principle and does not set out its facts. What it does establish is the setting: foreign legislation expropriating property, and owners who were aliens receiving no adequate compensation.

Where the owners are aliens and no adequate compensation is paid, the principle recognising foreign expropriatory legislation does not apply.

Step one — state the general rule first. Where a foreign State expropriates property within its own territory, English courts recognise the legislation and give effect to it, even if the property is afterwards brought to England.

Step two — state the territorial limit. A foreign expropriatory law cannot affect the ownership of property situated in England at the time of the foreign legislation. Recognition follows the reach of the legislating State, and that reach stops at its frontier.

Step three — state this case's further limit. Even within the foreign territory, recognition fails where the owners are aliens and the taking is without adequate compensation. That is a public-policy control, of the same family as the forum's refusal to apply a law that outrages its sense of justice and decency.

It opens: Will the forum give effect to foreign expropriatory legislation? — answer with the general rule, the territorial limit, and then this case.

Keep the three neighbouring doctrines apart, because the examiner is testing whether you can. Sovereign immunity — The Christina, Trendtex, and in India s. 86 of the Code — asks whether a foreign State can be sued. Recognition of expropriatory legislation asks whether its laws are given effect. The act of State doctrine is a third thing, which this course does not state; say so rather than invent it.

Connect it to the general power of exclusion. Foreign revenue laws are not enforced (Government of India v. Taylor), foreign penal laws are not enforced, with the forum deciding for itself whether a law is penal (Huntington v. Attrill, and Banco de Vizcaya v. Don Alfonso where the law was held penal), and laws offending fundamental policy are refused effect — a doctrine deliberately narrower in conflicts than in domestic law, a transaction valid by its lex causae not being invalidated unless enforcement would offend a principle so sacrosanct as to require maintenance at all costs.

It does not decide anything about property already situated in the forum, which the territorial limit covers, nor about compensation that is adequate.