John Coyle
University of North Carolina School of Law
John F. Coyle is the Reef C. Ivey II Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law. He is a past chair of the AALS Section on Conflict of Laws and is currently an Adviser for the American Law Institute’s Restatement (Third) of Conflict of Laws. He is the author of more than two dozen articles on choice-of-law clauses, forum selection clauses, cross-border dispute resolution, and international commercial contracts. Before entering the academy, he worked as a transactional attorney at Covington & Burling LLP and clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Using TLB to Teach Conflict of Laws (2026 Update)
This post updates our series explaining how professors can use resources on TLB to teach various classes. Previous posts have discussed Transnational Litigation, Civil Procedure, Foreign Relations Law, and International Business Transactions. This post discusses Conflict of Laws. All of these posts are accessible at our Teaching Resources page. Primers and Topic Pages Conflict of Laws covers three primary subjects: (1) personal…
Continue ReadingClause Confusion (Part II)
In a prior post, I showed that lawyers sometimes fail to distinguish choice-of-law clauses from forum selection clauses. In this post, I provide several examples of cases where judges made precisely the same mistake. In some of these cases, these errors were harmless. In others, they were not. Harmless Error There are a multitude of…
Continue ReadingClause Confusion (Part I)
There are many things in life that resemble something else. Some people struggle to distinguish alligators from crocodiles. Others have a hard time telling the difference between butterflies and moths. I myself cannot taste the difference between Coke and Pepsi… a fact that horrifies my family. All of these mistakes are both understandable and forgivable….
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