Spain has a well-deserved reputation of being a rather formalistic country when it comes to litigation. For example, according to the Civil Procedure Act, a Spanish translation of documents written in languages other than Spanish must be attached to the initial complaint. Otherwise, the Court may simple ignore them. A judgment of 15 October 2019…

As Bob Hudec explained in his legendary The GATT Legal System and World Trade Diplomacy, GATT’s (since 1995, WTO) long-standing practice of seeking to adopt decisions by consensus finds its roots in 1947, when the then 23 parties to GATT were a small club of good friends. The proposition that a friend might impose a…

On 9 June 2020 Barcelona Commercial Court no. 4 issued a decision rejecting the opposition filed by a company (the “Defendant”) against a decision of 2 September 2019 from the same Court that had ordered an “ex parte” preliminary injunction preventing the Defendant from marketing pemetrexed diarginine in Spain. The background of the case can…

One of the most salient features of Spanish patent litigation, in comparison to other countries, such as the United Kingdom, is its extreme rigidity.  Judges do not seem entitled to have a sip of water during Court hearings unless a specific provision of the law empowers them to do so. A recent Decision dated 19…

As explained in our blog of 25 March 2020, the declaration of the state of emergency by the Spanish Government on 14 March affected judicial activities in Spain very seriously. For example, Court hearings were suspended, with very few exceptions. Likewise, the periods of time to carry out judicial activities (for example, filing an appeal)…

In Odiorne v. Winkley (1814), Harvard professor Joseph Story, then sitting as a Judge at a Circuit Court of the District of Massacusetts, upon being called to decide whether a machine infringed a patent wrote, in the context of that case, that “The material question, therefore, is not whether the same elements of motion, or…

Barcelona Commercial Courts have a well-deserved reputation for being dynamic and creative. Not surprisingly, it was Judge Ferrándiz, already retired from the Supreme Court, who back in 1993, when he was sitting at Section 15 of the Court of Appeal of Barcelona, had the idea of specializing that Section on a small number of commercial…