Courts without borders? The politics and law of United States extraterritorial regulation

Regulating private transactions across international boundaries has long posed a profound challenge to states in the international system. In the United States, the judicial system functions as an important regulatory bottleneck between legislative rule givers and those to whom the rules are applied. When national-level courts decide to regulate disputes over conduct and persons wholly or partially outside their borders, the effect is active projection of domestic rules and policy preferences into the international realm---often in competition with rules set by other sovereigns. Although U.S. courts have been the most assertive in applying domestic regulatory rules extraterritorially, they have not done so uniformly across time or across issue areas. This dissertation seeks to identify and explain the conditions under which U.S. courts have opted to find and exercise jurisdiction to regulate transnational disputes with an extraterritorial 'center of gravity'.; This research uses statistical and qualitative methods to account for observable variation in U.S. court behavior on extraterritorial regulatory matters. Whether courts choose to regulate extraterritorially is chiefly a function of the degree of anticipated threat from disputed conduct to the future operation of domestic-level regulatory rules and structures. Where the absence of regulation is expected to encourage further extraterritorial conduct that will interfere with the ability to carry out domestic regulatory policy, regulation is considerably more likely. U.S. courts are likewise expected to regulate extraterritorially when violations of basic constitutional rights are at issue. Over time technological innovations and changes in domestic social understandings of the scope and content of basic rights have driven the production of private disputes and forced courts to consider the expansion of jurisdictional and regulatory rules.; This dissertation also examines two potential alternative explanations for U.S. court behavior in the extraterritorial realm and concludes that they are inferior to the argument developed in this research.; The implications of this research are directly relevant to scholarly debate over patterns of international rule convergence and institutional-ization, as well as to issues concerning the relevance of traditional norms of state sovereignty in the context of globalization.