Conflict of Laws

Conflict of laws (or private international law) is a set of procedural rules that determines which legal system and which jurisdiction apply to a given dispute. The rules typically apply when a legal dispute has a "foreign" element such as a contract agreed to by parties located in different countries, although the "foreign" element also exists in multi-jurisdictional countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia and Canada.

The term conflict of laws itself originates from situations where the ultimate outcome of a legal dispute depended upon which law applied, and the common law courts manner of resolving the conflict between those laws. In civil law, lawyers and legal scholars refer to conflict of laws as private international law. Private international law has no real connection with public international law, and is instead a feature of local law which varies from country to country.

The three branches of conflict of laws are

• Jurisdiction – whether the forum court has the power to resolve the dispute at hand
• Choice of law – the law which is being applied to resolve the dispute
• Foreign judgments – the ability to recognize and enforce a judgment from an external forum within the jurisdiction of the adjudicating forum