Determining the “Private Law” Nature: A Comparison Between Customary State Practice and Turkish Court Rulings

This Article uses a combination of doctrinal and comparative analyses to elucidate the most widely-used criteria according to which courts characterize an act as having a private-law nature. Further, this Article identifies the extent to which the Turkish State practice has embraced those criteria. To that end, this Article extracts two such widely-used criteria from patterns in customary State practice. In the end, the Article points out the extent to which those criteria are prevalent throughout the Turkish court rulings and concludes that Turkish caselaw is generally in alignment with the customary State practice in terms of the criteria used to determine a State act's private-law nature.