Vested Rights,

Abstract

The choice of law revolution is under attack. In a familiar pattern, once-new critiques have become old verities, and are now themselves ripe for dethronement. This Article is one piece of that revisionist campaign. It differs from some of the rest of the genre, however, in both focus and intent. To my mind, the vested rights tradition in whose overthrow the current orthodoxy was born combined a jurisprudential core with a set of further premises and details. The American choice of law revolution attacked the core and the additional premises and the additional details. The reassessment now beginning to stir has on the whole taken the critique of the core for granted, while attempting to revivify some of the rest. My own strategy, by contrast, will be to concede most of the periphery and to work at tightening, explaining, and justifying the core.