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| Conflict of laws and private international law |
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| Preliminaries |
| Definitional elements |
| Connecting factors |
| Substantive legal areas |
| Enforcement |
Conflict of laws in the United States is the field of procedural law dealing with choice of law rules when a legal action implicates the substantive laws of more than one jurisdiction and a court must determine which law is most appropriate to resolve the action. In the United States, the rules governing these matters have diverged from the traditional rules applied internationally. The outcome of this process may require a court in one jurisdiction to apply the law of a different jurisdiction.
The federal Constitution created a "plurilegal federal union" in which there are four types of conflicts between different legal systems: federal vs. state, federal vs. foreign, state vs. state, and state vs. foreign.[1] The first type are vertical conflicts resolved by federal preemption pursuant to the Supremacy Clause (and is therefore analyzed as an issue of constitutional law), meaning that conflict of laws in the United States focuses on the latter three types.[1] The complexity of American federalism and massive interstate diversity between the laws of the 50 states in the Union mean that U.S. federal and state courts as of the mid-2010s were deciding around 5,000 conflict-of-laws cases each year—far more than the courts of any other country. As a result, Americans have accumulated "vast judicial experience in resolving conflicts cases".[2]
- ^ a b Symeonides, Symeon (2016). Choice of Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 6. ISBN 9780190496722. Retrieved March 18, 2023.
- ^ Symeonides, Symeon (2016). Choice of Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 10. ISBN 9780190496722. Retrieved March 18, 2023.