Choice-of-Law Clauses and Marital Property Law
In a recent law review article, I criticized a unanimous decision of the Washington Supreme Court that enforced the choice-of-law clause in a contract to which only one spouse was a party to determine which jurisdiction’s law governed an issue relating to marital property. In this blog post, I first provide a concise account of…
Continue ReadingForum Selection Agreements as Indicators of Implied Choice of Law
Originally posted on the EAPIL blog on 31 August 2023, and currently updated in this blog. In a recent article, I explore what should be globally significant in a forum selection agreement as an indicator of the implied choice of law when the agreement omits a choice-of-law clause. This topic is in itself a very old one,…
Continue ReadingNew Empirical Study on CISG Litigation
There are a number of empirical studies about the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG). A recent intervention by Carolina Arlota and Brian McCall, When Federal Law Goes Unnoticed: Assessing the CISG’s Applicability Across U.S. Courts Based on an Empirical Research of Decisions from 1988 to 2020, in the…
Continue ReadingIncorporation by Reference and Choice of Law
The choice-of-law clause written into the contract of carriage for Delta Air Lines, Inc. (Delta) states that the agreement “shall be governed by and enforced in accordance with the laws of the United States of America and, to the extent not preempted by Federal law, the laws of the State of Georgia.” In a recent…
Continue ReadingParsing Invalidating Statutes (Part II)
In a prior post, I argued that the precise language used in state statutes purporting to invalidate choice-of-law clauses and forum selection clauses can have outsized effects in litigation. In this post, I continue this discussion by highlighting several statutes that purport to invalidate choice-of-law clauses in insurance contracts. Although these statutes all have the…
Continue ReadingParsing Invalidating Statutes (Part I)
In previous posts, I have written about how the precise language used in a choice-of-law or forum selection clause can prove consequential in litigation. In this post, I argue that the precise language used in state statutes purporting to invalidate these clauses can likewise have an outsized effect. There are hundreds of state statutes that…
Continue ReadingOptionality in Choice of Law
Choice-of-law clauses are sometimes described as tools for reducing legal uncertainty. This characterization, while correct, is incomplete. In cases where the suit is brought in a jurisdiction other than the one named in the choice-of-law clause, it is sometimes more accurate to think of the clause as an option. Either litigant may, if it so…
Continue ReadingAudio Content on TLB!
We are beginning to offer audio versions of some posts! We kick off the initiative with John Coyle’s recording of his post A Primer on Choice-of-Law Clauses. Choice of law and choice of law clauses are important issues in any legal system, ones that help students understand both contracts and civil procedure. Now students, foreign…
Continue ReadingDrafting the Opinion in Great Lakes
Over the past six years, I have spent a lot of time thinking about choice-of-law clauses. I have written about how to interpret them, about their extraterritorial effect, about their history, and about why insurance companies frequently omit them from their policies. If a pub were ever to host a trivia night devoted to choice-of-law…
Continue ReadingThe CISG and Choice-of-Law Clauses
Although the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) has been in force for over 35 years, there is still scholarly disagreement as to how this treaty interacts with choice-of-law clauses (see, e.g., the discussion on this blog: Coyle, Brand and Flechtner, Hayward and Lal). In principle, there seems to…
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