Book Review: The Law of Conflict of Laws

Abstract

This book is the outgrowth of a project started by the author some twenty-five years ago. The origin was an undertaking to prepare and Arkansas annotation to the Restatement of Conflict of Laws. Professor Leflar soon discovered, as did so many other state annotators, that except in the most unsatisfactory way, this was an impossible task. Case after case just could not be lined up as "in accord" or "contra" the Restatement blackletter. They would fit only vaguely or tangentially into the neat moulds of Professor Beale's conceptualism. To be sure, cases were decided for one or the other side in the litigation, but opinions were often muddled, illogical and confused. Professor Leflar was unhappy with his project and had the good sense to throw it up. Instead, he wrote a small book in the nature of a treatise on the Arkansas law of Conflict of Laws in an attempt to give a more accurate description of the law in his state. He then discovered, to use his own words that "on a subject like Conflict of Laws . . . no one state's law is complete within itself; the law is made up of a national mass of cases and writings including locally binding precedents, the latter being in general locally distinguishable on their facts from almost any later case that may arise."