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71 Law & Contemp. Probs. 273 (2008)
Cultural Conflicts

handle is hein.journals/lcp71 and id is 809 raw text is: CULTURAL CONFLICTS ANNELISE RILES* INTRODUcTION It is no secret that there is widespread dissatisfaction with the prevailing doctrinal approaches to conflict of laws in the United States.' Judges, law students, and lawyers fear conflicts problems like practically no other area of law. The methodologies for resolving conflicts problems that compete for judicial attention in the United States coexist uneasily in the Second Restatement, since none has managed to garner sufficient support and each has been the subject of extensive scholarly and judicial criticism.2 As Professor Arthur Von Mehren put it thirty years ago in the pages of this journal, Ultimately, a result is reached, yet the solution is too frequently neither entirely satisfying nor fully convincing.3 At least until the very recent resurgence of interest in the field exemplified by this special issue, contemporary conflicts problems have not inspired the theoretical interest as they once did. More generally, if one of the central objectives of conflicts is harmonization of law from below, that is, the gradual evolution of transjurisdictional accommodation and cooperation, it is not clear that, in the United States at least, conflicts is contributing as much as it should or could to this important project. In Europe, in contrast, according to Professor Horatia Muir-Watt, judicial analyses of private international law are contributing substantially, not only to the harmonization of European law, but also to the creation of a new Copyright © 2008 by Annelise Riles. This Article is also available at http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/lcp. * Jack G. Clarke Professor of Far East Legal Studies, Cornell Law School, and Professor of Anthropology, Cornell University. For comments and conversation that substantially shaped the direction of this article, I am grateful to Gregory Alexander, Karen Knop, Ralf Michaels, Hirokazu Miyazaki, Eduardo Pefialver, and Kevin Sobel-Read. I am also grateful to Leticia Barrera, Kevin Boroumand, Anna Chehtova, Sergio Latorre, and Guillaume Ratel for their research assistance. 1. This article takes as its point of reference U.S. conflicts law. When not otherwise specified, references to conflicts rules, conflicts doctrines, or conflicts theories refer to these aspects of the field as practiced and developed in the United States. It also takes choice-of-law problems as its principal focus. This is because although much of what is argued here applies equally to questions of jurisdiction and recognition of judgments, debates about choice of law provide a particularly sharp and well developed framework for considering problems of cultural conflict. 2. See Symeon C. Symeonides, Choice of Law in the American Courts in 2006: Twentieth Annual Survey, 54 AM. J. COMP. L. 697, 705 (2006). 3. Arthur T. Von Mehren, Choice of Law and the Problem of Justice, 41 LAW & CONTEMP. PROBs. 27,27 (Spring 1977).

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