Selection of the governing law

The selection of the law which is to govern tort liability is conceptually one of the most difficult problems in the conflict of laws, at any rate if the vast amount of learned discussion given to it by the writers is anything to go by. Much of the modern academic discussion and most of the case law emanates from the United States, and it is on this topic that American methodologies and methodologists chiefly concentrate. There has been little English case law on the question (though much more in Australia and Canada). This may suggest either that there is little litigation about torts committed abroad, or that litigants here do not trouble to prove any relevant rules of foreign law, perhaps because these rules are little different in effect from English rules of tort law in many cases.

Also, the relative profuseness of the case law from the United States and the Commonwealth as compared with our own meagre collection is easily explained. In those countries there are several different jurisdictions; in North America about sixty. Of course, there are several in the British Isles. But a very great number of modern cases in all countries have arisen out of road traffic accidents; it is easier to drive a car across a land frontier than to cross the sea with it, and England's only land boundary is with Scotland.