Judge considers a jurisdiction clause in favour of the courts in one part of a country
Dicey, Morris and Collins on the Conflict of Laws (15th edn) provides that: "If a contract provides that all disputes between the parties shall be referred to the exclusive jurisdiction of a foreign tribunal, not only will proceedings brought in England in breach of such agreement usually be stayed, but also the foreign court is deemed to have jurisdiction over the parties. A contractual submission to a particular court is not of itself a submission generally to the jurisdiction of all courts of that country; the question is one of construction of the contract."
In this case, the relevant contract contained a clause providing for Turkish law and "place of jurisdiction is Ankara". One of the issues in this case was therefore whether one of the parties could challenge the jurisdiction of the Istanbul Court. Butcher J held that there could be well be a submission to all the courts of a country if the place of jurisdiction was a city in a particular country (especially if it is the capital city): "This would depend in part, as it seems to me, on the extent to which the courts in that country operated independently of each other; whether there might be transfers between courts; and whether, in view of such matters, it was plausible that parties might have wished to choose only the courts of a particular city or place within the country rather than the courts of the country".
As the judge lacked material as to whether there was any factual matrix regarding the drafting of the contract, he was only able to conclude that the claimants (who were arguing that there had only been a submission to the courts of Ankara and not Istanbul) had shown a serious issue to be tried and a good arguable case.
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