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Watt, Horatia Muir --- "Private International Law" [2006] ELECD 202; in Smits, M. Jan (ed), "Elgar Encyclopedia of Comparative Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006)

Book Title: Elgar Encyclopedia of Comparative Law

Editor(s): Smits, M. Jan

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781845420130

Section: Chapter 51

Section Title: Private International Law

Author(s): Watt, Horatia Muir

Number of pages: 12

Extract:

51 Private international law*
Horatia Muir Watt


Points of contact between private international and comparative law
Private international law and comparative law are to a large extent comple-
mentary, since they both focus on differences between legal systems. While
private international law is essentially designed to provide practical solu-
tions to international or cross-border disputes potentially subject to diverse
laws and several courts, nevertheless, it cannot dispense with a reflection on
the theoretical and cultural significance of the differences between the
various responses to an identical problem ­ a significance which, in many
cases, the very use of legal rules outside their original context in order to
resolve an issue raising a conflict of laws may serve to reveal. Indeed, firstly,
as a tool of governance designed to manage legal pluralism, private inter-
national law has always been dependent upon a normative vision of the rela-
tionship between legal systems, and in some cases between national systems
and a transcendent legal order. This vision is in turn largely evolutive, and
varies according to cultural context; it depends upon a certain representa-
tion of the nature of law, pertaining to the comparative legal philosophy
and epistemology. It explains the way in which diversity is problematized
within the many theories of private international law, and accounts for
methodological differences both in respect of choice of law and in matters
of jurisdiction (Section I). Recently, economic globalization has favoured
the emergence of a new paradigm of the relationship between national legal
systems, which ...