Bomhoff on the Constitution of Conflict of Laws

Jacco Bomhoff (LSE Law) has posted The Constitution of the Conflict of Laws on SSRN.

Private international law doctrines are often portrayed as natural, largely immutable, boundaries on local public agency in a transnational private world. Challenging this problematic conception requires a reimagining of the field, not only as a species of public law or an instrument of governance, but as a constitutional phenomenon. This paper investigates what such a ‘constitution of the conflict of laws’ could look like. Two features are given special emphasis. First: the idea of the conflict of laws as an independent source of constitutionalist normativity, rather than as a mere passive receptacle for constraints imposed by classical, liberal, constitutional law. And second: the possibility of a local, ‘outward-looking’ form of conflicts constitutionalism to complement more familiar, inwardly focused, federalist conceptions.