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Publication Date

3-1997

Document Type

Response

Abstract

I congratulate the Walter F. George School of Law for bringing together a distinguished group of conflict-of-laws scholars to discuss some of the best known cases in the field. There is no better way to honor Brainerd Currie of whom the School is justifiably proud as a former student and faculty member. Although, as Professor Currie freely acknowledged, he was not the first to argue that the territorial reach of a law should depend on the law's content and purpose, his series of carefully wrought articles endowed the concept such intellectual force that it could no longer be ignored. Within five years of the publication of the first article in the series, the New York Court of Appeals abandoned the place-of-wrong rule in torts. The court chose law by a "[c]omparison of the relative 'contacts' and 'interests"' of the two jurisdictions involved and cited Professor Currie for his "criticism of the traditional rule."

The comments of members of the Mercer Roundtable and the audience present useful insights into the choice-of-law process. My remarks focus on some of the many interesting issues raised by the participants. For convenience, this Article follows the order of the Roundtable discussion and uses as headings the same cases analyzed by the participants.

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