【Out Now】Silberman’s Hague Academy General Course: The Counter-Revolution in U.S. Private International Law: From Standards to Rules?
For anyone who begins studying private international law – particularly from a civil law perspective – one of the first concepts encountered, after Savigny’s ‘Copernican Revolution’, is the American ‘Choice-of-Law Revolution’. Since the late 1950s, American courts and scholars have progressively abandoned the rigid territorial methodology embodied in the First Restatement of Conflict of Laws in favour of more flexible approaches based on standards and policy-oriented analyses. The pioneering contributions of Brainerd Currie, David Cavers, Robert Leflar, and William Baxter, among others, fundamentally reshaped American conflicts law and made the United States a laboratory of modern choice-of-law theory.
The issue of “foreign law” and its application, long considered essential to the functioning of private international law (PIL), continues to trigger interesting discussions and debates.