Conflict of Laws, Private International Law, Cases and Materials

The authors of the seventeenth edition seek to honor the casebook’s long (dating back to 1936) history. The authors also revised this edition with an eye toward the teaching and study of Conflict of Laws nine decades later. The authors continue to use the subtitle “Private International Law” to connect the book to the more common title of the subject outside the U.S. and to make plain the fact that the materials extend beyond domestic cases to include international contexts. The latter has always been important but is perhaps of increasing relevance to would-be lawyers in today’s highly interconnected world.

Conflicts of Laws doctrine is both deep and wide. It raises fundamental jurisprudential issues (Andreas Lowenfeld years ago called conflicts “applied jurisprudence”) while at the same time ranging across all fields of substantive and procedural law. Whether they realize it or not, every litigator and transactional lawyer will face issues raised in this course. The authors recognize the need, therefore, to provide appropriate review of civil procedure to prepare students for the study of conflicts.

This edition maintains the virtue of flexibility. Some professors will choose to cover a great deal of international and comparative law. Others, however, will prefer to address conflicts only in the domestic sphere. Many will fall somewhere in between those two poles. This edition allows professors to make their own coverage choice.

This edition includes coverage of many new Supreme Court decisions, which range from state court jurisdiction under the due process clause to extraterritorial application of federal law to the scope of federal common law. Particular care has been taken to incorporate sections of the draft Third Restatement of Conflict of Laws and compare them to their Second Restatement counterparts. And there is coverage of new international developments, especially as to the European Union.

Here are some chapter-by-chapter highlights:

• Chapter 2, concerning domicile, provides coverage of the key black letter rules of that widely used doctrine. It also includes the adjacent concepts of residence as it is used in U.S. law and habitual residence as it is used in other countries. New material has been added on the issue of domicile of non-U.S. citizens (temporary visa holders, refugees, asylum seekers, and those who are present in the U.S. without any legal basis). A new note addresses the issue of the time at which domicile is assessed when a party has changed domicile.
• Chapter 3, concerning personal jurisdiction reflects recent doctrinal shifts. The Court’s constriction of general jurisdiction has led to two interesting developments. First, in Ford, new since the last edition, the Court dealt with a case in which contact was clear but it was not altogether clear whether it was sufficiently “related” to the cause of action to support specific jurisdiction. Second, in Mallory the Court declared general jurisdiction over a corporation to be constitutional based upon consent by the corporation’s registering to do business in a state. In another case, Fuld v. PLO, the Court finally held that the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause not as demanding as the Fourteenth’s.
• Chapter 4 pulls together everything that bears on limiting a court’s exercise of jurisdiction that it otherwise has. This includes forum selection agreements in interstate and international transactions, antisuit injunctions, dismissals (or denials of motions to dismiss) in cases of parallel litigation (lis pendens) or on the ground of forum non conveniens, and federal transfer.
• Chapter 5 covers former adjudication. While students have likely been exposed to some of the basics in their civil procedure course, this chapter explores issues almost certainly not covered there: What counts as a judgment for purposed of claim and issue preclusion—administrative agency orders, equity decrees, modifiable support orders? Where is the line between a judgment, which must be accorded full faith and credit, and enforcement mechanisms, which do not travel with a judgment? How exacting is full faith and credit as to judgments and what exceptions, if any, are there? What is the role of public policy both as to judgments of sister states and as to foreign country judgments? On the last point, this edition updates overage of the SPEECH Act, which limits enforcement of foreign judgments that impinge on first amendment concerns. A new development covered here are potential penal law or public policy exceptions to U.S. judgments based on so-called “bounty” laws (aimed at enforcing abortion or gun sale restrictions). There are also updated notes on new developments in Europe on recognition of U.S. punitive damage awards.
• Chapter 6, concerning the impact of the Constitution, was in the last edition streamlined to improve teachability, and retains its form in this edition.
• Chapters 7 and 8 present the central themes of choice of law. Chapter 7 addresses issues that cut across choice of law regimes, such as the role of public policy, substance and procedure, and renvoi. New material includes recent statutes creating private enforcement of abortion retractions that have been countered by other state statutes declaring a public policy exception to enforcement of judgments based on such laws. And the draft Third Restatement has a somewhat different approach to the statute of limitations problem. The section on borrowing statutes has been reorganized and expanded.
• Chapter 8 was considerably revised in the fifteenth edition to show the progression from the traditional system to the height of the conflicts revolution, to a developing consensus to consolidate modern analysis in a manner that provides more predictability and certainty. The sixteenth edition shortened this chapter considerably and it remains shortened but has been updated with new cases and much more extensive coverage of the draft Third Restatement.
• Chapter 9 addresses conflicts involving the federal government. How are conflicts between state and federal law resolved (the Erie doctrine)? To what extent do federal statutes apply to persons or events in other countries? Does the U.S. constitution apply extraterritorially? The Supreme Court has been quite active in these areas in recent years, and the most recent cases are covered. On Erie, Berk v. Choy (2026) now completes the run of cases. On federal common law, the older (1997) Atherton case has been replaced by Rodriguez v. FDIC (2020). Cassirer v. Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation (2022) addresses the possibility of a federal common law of choice of law for Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act Cases. Finally, lower court cases address federal common law in the context of climate change litigation. On statutory extraterritoriality this edition covers Yegiazaryan v. Smagin (2023) (RICO), Abitron Austria GmbH v. Hetronic Int'l, Inc. (2023) (the Lanham Act)), and two Alien Tort Statute cases, Jesner v. Arab Bank, PLC (2018) and Nestle USA, Inc. v. Doe (2021). On extraterritorial application of the constitution, Agency for Int'l Dev. v. All. for Open Soc'y Int'l, Inc. (2020) provides a good summary of the law. And Dep't of Homeland Sec. v. Thuraissigiam (2020) addresses the applicability of the constitution to persons within the United States but just at the border.
• Chapters 10 through 13 cover particular subjects such a property, family law, and corporate law for professors who desire to go into these subjects in more depth. Recent changes in the law particularly affect Chapter 11 on Family Law as the ripple effects of Obergefell work through the judicial system: Whether that case retroactively creates marital rights in relationships formed before it was handed down, for example. Also covered is the somewhat broader jurisdictional bases for divorce recognized in the draft Third Restatement. And two new Supreme Court cases on the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction—Monasky v. Taglieri (2020) and Golan v. Saada (2022) are covered. The draft Third Restatement proposes a shift away from the universal application of the situs rule in matters involving real estate and is discussed in note material.

Imprint: Foundation Press
Series: University Casebook Series
Publication Date: 07/27/2026