I'm honestly surprised at this because there could be so many complications, and laws in a foreign country could be so different as to be incompatible with US laws.

Although the wiki does say it's up to a judge if the foreign judgement will be enforced locally or not. The legislation is one thing, do you know how often a US judge does tend to enforce a foreign judgement? What percentage of attempts to do so are successful?

This exception listed on the wiki page "The judgment is repugnant to the public policy of the state where enforcement is sought" I imagine would invalidate a lot of attempts.

Also, another listed exception "In the case of jurisdiction based only on personal service, the foreign court was an inconvenient forum for the trial" - wouldn't that be sufficient to stop US residents from having to spend a lot of money to defend themselves in a country they might never go to?

If you're in the UK and I'm in the US and I sue you, it doesn't seem reasonable to expect you to have to travel here or to spend money on local representation to defend yourself.

I would think the way it would work is that I would et a summary judgement here, and then it would be on me to travel to the UK to try and get it enforced. That seems fairer to me, although I guess it doesn't work like that.

Feedback I've heard ranges from "almost always" to "typically", but I've never seen actual stats on it. It's going to be pretty fact specific, so unless your case maps well to a common fact pattern any statistic may not be too useful.

It's common enough in any case that several state's passed laws to deal with foreign (particularly UK) defamation lawsuits, and then a federal law. So a specific kind of abuse of this process was common enough for a federal law on the subject.

Sadly it seems we lacked the foresight to realize that to the extent that many of these were false and malicious cases that the parties can just cook up some other grounds. So when Wright sued critics in Norway, the UK, and Antigua he did so on the basis of defamation, but when his target list included US persons he didn't use a defamation claim.

> If you're in the UK and I'm in the US and I sue you, it doesn't seem reasonable to expect you to have to travel here or to spend money on local representation to defend yourself.

So one of the reasons to deny domestication is that the foreign court didn't properly have jurisdiction over the subject matter. If I had no connection to the US then there wouldn't be a reasonable basis to claim the US court had jurisdiction over me.

But if you and I had some interaction then on the basis of that interaction I might have subjected myself to your jurisdiction. The internet has made it easy to arguably be subject to any jurisdiction anywhere in the world. If you look at some of the arguments in English courts (for example) on jurisdiction they like to emphasize e.g. that someone publishes in English documents which are available and read in the UK. There is a bar for jurisdiction, it's a real bar, but it's not necessarily a particularly high bar.

To complicate matters, summary judgements and other pre-trial judgements like jurisdiction are generally decided on a basis of assuming the claimant's facts are all true. This is a real problem with litigating with an unashamed liar who is primarily interested in damaging you with the process, since they can just make up whatever facts they need to keep the case going.

You don't have to convince me that the existing process is not good. I think it made more sense decades ago when it was much harder for an ordinary person to be arguably subject to arbitrary jurisdictions.

Aside, NY does have domestication rules too, though it does sound like they're somewhat better than the more common version. (e.g. safer to take a default judgement)-- though I haven't really looked into them.