Death of Conflicts

T HIS ARTICLE is about choice of law.It is about making choices of law fit the policies of the underlying substantive law and about why that fit is important both to the choice of law and to the substantive law.Courts all across this country still are in Prosser's quagmire' of choice of law.They are so busy counting up contacts or weighing out relations that they have lost sight of the substantive law itself and the policies that give the law form.They bog down in a welter of details and, from the perspective of their own related non-conflicts cases, often reach the incorrect result.They thus lose the chance to achieve clarity not only in choice of law but also in the analysis and theory of substantive law.Courts continue to sink beneath the dismal waters of the conflicts quagmire, but there is a lifeline: Keep choice of law consonant with the policies of the underlying substantive law. 2 Courts that grab this lifeline soon will see that those policies and laws usually contain no geographic strings and that choice of law decisions may be cut loose from the illicit geographic focus of the old and new choice of law theories.Having cut conflicts loose from geography, the courts will not be lost in a swamp with no reasoned way to resolve conflicts; for there remains the substantive law itself and its informing and enforming policies, in which the conflict has arisen in the first place and through which the road to terrafirma lies.By traveling that road, the