国际私法。英文材料.docVIP

第一章 The Conflicts Case（必读）Many legal disputes are purely local. For instance: whether the contractor has or has not substantially performed when the location of an interior wall was off by six inches will usually be decided by local courts and according to local contract law.Increasingly, however, disputes will have a foreign element. In conflicts law, foreign does not necessarily mean the same as foreign country. Instead, foreign is everything which is not local. Thus, for instance, foreign parties are parties from another state of the United States or from a foreign country. Similarly, a foreign transaction is one which took place outside the local state. For instance, a product manufactured in another state or country may cause injury locally: the victim would like to sue to locally rather than have to travel where the defendant tortfeasor is. Also, the victim would like, if possible, to have the court apply local law (for instance, because it provides for strict liability). Assume that the victim does recover in his or her home state but that the foreign (out-of-state) defendant owns no property there: the judgment creditor will therefore now have to seek recognition and enforcement of the judgment in the defendants home state (or in another state where there are assets belonging to the defendant).Conflicts Law thus has an ordering function: When the case is connected with more than one legal system-when it is an interstate or international case--, conflicts law decides who has the power to decide the case, according to whose law the case should be decided, and what the effect is elsewhere of the resulting judgment.As a general rule, American conflicts law does not differentiate between interstate and international cases: the same rule with respect to jurisdiction, choice of law, and the recognition of judgments apply to both.Exceptions:1) In jurisdiction, the international nature of a case may make litigation in an American court inappropriate.2) The Fu