Legal History Commons^™

The Comity Doctrine, Hessel E. Yntema

Michigan Law Review

The doctrine of comity, as developed in the Netherlands during the last quarter of the Seventeenth Century, for the first time posed in stark simplicity the basic dilemma of conflicts law in modem times to mediate between the pretensions of territorial sovereignty and the needs of international commerce. As Ulrik Huber, the most influential exponent of the doctrine, observed: "Exempla, quibus utemur, ad juris privati species maxime quidem pertinebunt, sed judicium de illis unice juris publici rationibus constat, & exinde definiri debent.'' ["The examples which we shall use belong principally to the category of private law but their treatment …