Conflict of laws concerns the process for determining the applicable law to resolve disputes between individuals, corporations in multi-jurisdictional cases and transactions. Conflict of laws especially affects private international law, but may also affect cases where a contract makes incompatible reference to more than one legal framework. The term "conflict of laws" is primarily used in the United States and Canada, though it has also come into use in the United Kingdom. In most other countries, the term private international law is used. Conflict of laws usually refers to domestic laws that are not part of international law, and the calculus only includes international laws when the nation has treaty obligations. For countries that use the "private international law" terminology, it comes from the private law/public law dichotomy in civil law systems. In this form of legal system, the term "private international law" does not imply an agreed upon international legal corpus.
Choice of laws
Courts faced with a choice of law issue have a two-stage process:
the court will apply the law of the forum to all procedural matters ;
it counts the factors that connect or link the legal issues to the laws of potentially relevant states and applies the laws that have the greatest connection, e.g. the law of nationality or the law of habitual residence. The court will determine the plaintiffs' legal status and capacity. The court will determine the law of the state in which land is situated that will be applied to determine all questions of title. The law of the place where a transaction physically takes place or of the occurrence that gave rise to the litigation will often be the controlling law selected when the matter is substantive, but the proper law has become a more common choice.
Contracts
Many contracts and other forms of legally binding agreement include a jurisdiction or arbitration clause specifying the parties' choice of venue for any litigation. In the EU, this is governed by the Rome I Regulation. Choice of law clauses may specify which laws the court or tribunal should apply to each aspect of the dispute. This matches the substantive policy of freedom of contract and will be determined by the law of the state where the choice of law clause confers its competence. Oxford Professor Adrian Briggs suggests that this is doctrinally problematic as it is emblematic of 'pulling oneself up by the bootstraps'. Judges have accepted that the principle of party autonomy allows the parties to select the law most appropriate to their transaction. This judicial acceptance of subjective intent excludes the traditional reliance on objective connecting factors; it also harms consumers as vendors often impose one-sided contractual terms selecting a venue far from the buyer's home or workplace. Contractual clauses relating to consumers, employees, and insurance beneficiaries are regulated under additional terms set out in Rome I, which may modify the contractual terms imposed by vendors.
