Conflict of Laws - The Stages in A Conflict Case

The Stages in A Conflict Case

1. The court must first decide whether it has jurisdiction and, if so, whether it is the appropriate venue given the problem of forum shopping.
2. The next step is the characterization of the cause of action into its component legal categories which may sometimes involve an incidental question (also note the distinction between procedural and substantive laws).
3. Each legal category has one or more choice of law rules to determine which of the competing laws should be applied to each issue. A key element in this may be the rules on renvoi.
4. Once the applicable law is decided, that law must be proved before the forum court and applied to reach a judgment.
5. The successful party must then enforce the judgment which will first involve the task of securing cross-border recognition of the judgment.

In those states with an underdeveloped set of Conflict rules, decisions on jurisdiction tend to be made on an ad hoc basis, with such choice of law rules as have been developed embedded into each subject area of private law and tending to favour the application of the lex fori or local law. In states with a more mature system, the set of Conflict rules stands apart from the local private civil law and adopts a more international point of view both in its terminology and concepts. For example, in the European Union, all major jurisdictional matters are regulated under the Brussels Regime, e.g. the rule of lis alibi pendens from Brussels 1 Regulation applies in the Member States and its interpretation is controlled by the European Court of Justice rather than by local courts. That and other elements of the Conflict rules are produced supranationally and implemented by treaty or convention. Because these rules are directly connected with aspects of sovereignty and the extraterritorial application of laws in the courts of the signatory states, they take on a flavour of public rather than private law because each state is compromising the usual expectations of their own citizens that they will have access to their local courts, and that local laws will apply in those local courts. Such aspects of public policy have direct constitutional significance whether applied in the European context or in federated nations such as the United States, Canada, and Australia where the courts have to contend not only with jurisdiction and law conflicts between the constituent states or territories, but also as between state and federal courts, and as between constituent states and relevant laws from other states outside the federation.