Choice of Law: Cases and Materials for a Concise Course on Conflict of Laws (Coursebook)

This book is designed for a two-credit course dealing primarily with choice of law. The text runs approximately 300 pages and is designed to give students an appreciation of the many methods that courts use to decide choice of law cases. With all the competing curricular demands on students, altogether too many students are not willing to commit three credits to a course in Conflict of Laws.

Yet, a two-credit course is sufficient to examine the core of conflict of laws – choice of law – and the availability of such a course can enable students to learn this increasingly important area. Furthermore, many schools offer intersession and summer courses that would allow students to take a two-credit course in choice of law.

In addition to presenting a set of materials tailored for a shorter course, this book corrects the failure of most conflict of laws casebooks to give students an up-to-date picture of current issues in choice of law.

The extant casebooks rely heavily on the older “classic” cases about conflicts that are of little practical importance today and do not expose the student to the diversity of important current conflicts that courts or legislatures must resolve.

This book, while often using classic cases to set the stage, primarily uses modern cases and statutes to both illustrate the contexts in which conflict of laws issues arise today and present the most current methods of resolving them.

To give the student a richer understanding of how choice-of-law theory plays out in practice the book provides subsections dealing with such issues as (1) conflicts between differing rules on comparative fault; (2) products liability (3) medical malpractice; and (4) workers’ compensation. In addition to the torts section the book has chapters dealing with Contracts, Estate and Trusts, Family Law and Constitution Control of Choice of Law.

This edition has added a chapter dealing with the most recent developments in United States Supreme Court holdings on jurisdiction. Unlike other books that focus only on theory this book shows how the differing approaches to choice-of-law play out on the issues that most often arise in litigation.