Opinion ID: 1199837
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Presumptive Law

Text: A scholar in the field of conflict of laws, Professor Currie, suggests several principles that serve as a useful starting point in choice of law analysis: 1. The normal business of courts being the adjudication of domestic cases, and the normal tendency of lawyers and judges being to think in terms of domestic law, the normal expectation should be that the rule of decision will be supplied by the domestic law as a matter of course. 2. The court should ordinarily depart from this procedure only at the instance of a party wishing to obtain the advantage of a foreign law. 3. The law of the forum, as the source of the rule of decision, should normally be displaced only by the interested party's timely invocation of the foreign law. The interested party invokes foreign law by calling attention to its relevance and its superior claim to be applied, and by informing the court of its tenor. (Italics ours.) Brainerd Currie, Selected Essays on the Conflicts of Laws 75 (1963).