Rights, Fairness, and Choice of Law

One is hard put to find a serious discussion of rights in the current academic literature or judicial discussions of choice of law. With a few notable exceptions, the academic talk is all about policies, or interests, or functional analysis. Even in leading constitutional decisions, the validity of the state\u27s claim to apply its own law is measured primarily in terms of the adequacy of its interest in having its law applied, appraised in light of the contacts between the state and the controversy. Talking about rights is like talking about perpetual motion machines, phlogiston, or faeries. [O]ne may now wonder, wrote David Cavers in his seminal article A Critique of the Choice-of-Law Problem, how any juristic construct such as \u27right\u27 could have been accepted as fundamental in the explanation of any important aspect of judicial activity