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Conflict Of Laws And Accuracy In The Allocation Of Government Responsibility, Joel P. Trachtman

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The field of conflict of laws suffers from a lack of theoretical coherence, and therefore fails to provide a satisfactory basis for discourse, adjudication, legislation, and inter-governmental negotiation regarding issues of prescriptive scope. This Article advances a law and economics-based approach to conflict of laws for use in both the domestic and international context. The Article first assesses the theoretical coherence of some principal conflict of laws approaches, analyzing their resolution of four tensions: predictability and adminstrability versus accuracy, unilateralism versus multilateralism, private interest versus public interests, and courts versus legislatures. It refers to Professor Baxter's "comparative impairment" methodology as …