To better appreciate present-day private international law and its future prospects and challenges, we should consider the history and historiography of the field. This book offers an original approach to the study of conflict of laws and legal history that exposes doctrinal lawyers to historical context, and legal historians to the intricacies of legal doctrine. The analysis is based on an in-depth examination of Medieval and Early Modern conflict of laws, focusing on the classic texts of Bartolus and Huber. Combining theoretical insights, textual analysis and historical perspectives, the author presents the preclassical conflict of laws as a rich world of doctrines and policies, theory and practice, context and continuity. This book challenges preconceptions and serves as an advanced introduction which illustrates the relevance of history in commanding private international law, while aspiring to make private international law relevant for history.

This book compares the two golden ages of private international law (PIL): the first is the era of Story and Savigny in the nineteenth century, while the second comprises the last fifty years. The period between 1970 and 2020 has been one of rapid changes and dense legislative responses, exemplified by the adoption of over one hundred national PIL codifications and almost as many international or regional conventions and regulations. These instruments provide a rich source for this book’s incisive and instructive comparisons and a fertile ground for a reliable assessment of the progress of PIL as a discipline. This book skillfully uncovers and meticulously documents the gradual—and largely unnoticed—transition of PIL from the idealism of the nineteenth century to the pragmatic eclecticism and pluralism of the twenty-first century.

This wide-ranging collection of essays reflects the manifold scholarly interests of legal historian Charles Donahue, whose former students engage here with questions related to foundational Roman law concepts, the impact of the law on women and families in medieval and early modern Europe, the intersection of law and religion, and the echoes of legal ideas on later developments in American law and in world literature and philosophy. From the monks of Metz to the book sellers of colonial Boston, from fourteenth-century English charters to the writings of Faust, these essays invite you to experience law at once learned and lived. Contributors are: Charles Bartlett, Anton Chaevitch, Wim Decock, Rowan Dorin, Sally E. Hadden, Elizabeth Haluska-Rausch, Nikitas E. Hatzimihail, Samantha Kahn Herrick, Daniel Jacobs, Elizabeth Papp Kamali, Amalia D. Kessler, Saskia Lettmaier, Sara McDougall, Stuart M. McManus, Elizabeth W. Mellyn, Bharath Palle, Ryan Rowberry, Carol Symes, James R. Townshend, and John Witte, Jr.

This important book offers an ambitious and interdisciplinary vision of how private international law (or the conflict of laws) might serve as a heuristic for re-working our general understandings of legality in directions that respond to ever-deepening global ecological crises. Unusual in legal scholarship, the author borrows (in bricolage mode) from the work of Bruno Latour, alongside indigenous cosmologies, extinction theories and Levinassian phenomenology, to demonstrate why this field's specific frontier location at the outpost of the law – where it is viewed from the outside as obscure and from the inside as a self-contained normative world – generates its potential power to transform law generally and globally. Combining pragmatic and pluralist theory with an excavation of 'shadow' ecological dimensions of law, the author, a recognised authority within the field as conventionally understood, offers a truly global view. Put simply, it is a generational magnum opus. All international and transnational lawyers, be they in the private or public field, should read this book.

Choice of Law provides an in-depth sophisticated coverage of the choice-of-law part Conflicts Law (or Private International Law) in torts, products liability, contracts, forum-selection and arbitration clauses, insurance, statutes of limitation, domestic relations, property, marital property, and successions. It also covers the constitutional framework and conflicts between federal law and foreign law. The book explains the doctrinal and methodological foundations of choice of law and then focuses on its actual practice, examining not only what courts say but also what they do. It identifies the emerging decisional patterns and extracts predictions about likely outcomes.

Private international law has long been understood as a doctrinal and technical body of law, without interesting theoretical foundations or implications. By systematically exploring the rich array of philosophical topics that are part of the fabric of private international law, Philosophical Foundations of Private International Law fills a significant and long-standing void in the legal and philosophical literature. The contributions to this volume are testimony to the significant potential for interaction between philosophy and private international law. Some aim to expand and rethink classical jurisprudential theories by focusing on law beyond the state and on the recognition of foreign law and judgments in domestic courts. Others bring legal and moral theories to bear on traditional debates in private international law, such as legal pluralism, transnational justice, the interpretation of foreign legal policies, and the boundaries of the legal system. Several engage with the history of both private international law and legal and political philosophy. They point to missed opportunities when philosophers ignored law's transnational dimensions, or when private international law scholars failed to position their theories within broader philosophical schools of thought. Some seek to complete past attempts to articulate the philosophical dimensions of private international law that were never carried through. Thought-provoking and topical, this volume displays the varied themes cutting through the disciplines of private international law and philosophy.