Conflict of Laws,9/e

It is forty-five years since this book first appeared; the preface to the first edition is dated April 1971. John Morris could not have foreseen the ensuing transformation of the English rules of the conflict of laws. In 1971, the rules were almost all judge-made. John Morris had few equals in his analysis of difficult case-law and, it has to be said, in his enjoyment of the extraordinary facts that cross-border and cross-cultural cases present. Statutory intervention had been very limited and the work of the Law Commission in the field of private international law lay ahead. So, a married woman had a domicile dependent on that of her husband; the rules on the recognition of foreign divorces and, especially, nullity decrees were in a chaotic state; those on choice of law in torts had just been addressed by the House of Lords in a decision that served only to produce debate and confusion. The United Kingdom was not yet a member of what was then the European Economic Community, and it was another 25 years before the European institutions acquired competence in private international law.