Conflict of Laws

Catalog description

This course explores an increasingly important set of questions in state, federal, and international litigation: What principles frame the choice of substantive legal rules when legal problems transcend jurisdictional boundaries? How do courts choose which law to apply when the transactions, relationships, or occurrences at issue in a lawsuit implicate more than one state or country? How do federal courts conceive of their adjudicatory jurisdiction in the international system, the recognition of foreign judgments, and the extraterritorial application of US law? And how does arbitration, considered both as a substitute for judicial dispute resolution and as a system that still requires courts to enforce arbitral awards, fit within this regime? In addition to these general questions, the course will consider doctrinal devices that federal courts use to handle multi-forum litigation, including abstention, anti-suit injunctions, and preclusion.