COL 1 - Overview PDF

Takeaways The conflict of laws determines how disputes with an international dimension should be handled by the courts. It is not a body of substantive rules, but rather rules that determine which laws should apply to a legal dispute. The conflict of laws impacts civil litigation at four stages:...

Takeaways The conflict of laws determines how disputes with an international dimension should be handled by the courts. It is not a body of substantive rules, but rather rules that determine which laws should apply to a legal dispute. The conflict of laws impacts civil litigation at four stages: jurisdiction, interlocutory, choice of law, and post-trial. This course will cover the essentials of the conflict of laws, focusing on select common law rules and contract and tort claims. Andrew Yip (00:01.998) Hi everyone, welcome to the Part B module on the conflict of laws. My name is Marcus Teo and I\'m a Sheridan Fellow at the NUS Faculty of Law where I teach and research the conflict of laws. And I will be your principal examiner for this module. Andrew Yip (00:21.196) So we\'re going to start our series of lectures for short introduction about the conflict of laws in general and this course in particular. So, what is the conflict of laws? Why on earth are we asking you to study this for Part B? Well, we can start by noting that the conflict of laws is\... If you have a contract between two parties from different countries or governed by a law of a country which neither of the parties come from, or if you have a tort which occurs across different jurisdictions, or between a tort visa from one jurisdiction and a claimant from another jurisdiction, which courts should hear this dispute? What law should govern the dispute when it arises in any court? And what happens when there are conflicting judgements which two different courts issue on the matter? How should these issues be resolved by a Singapore court or by the Singapore legal system? The conflict of laws is a system of law, is a body of law within Singapore law, which determines how these disputes should be handled by our courts. Because of its international dimension, the conflict of laws is also called private international law. But unlike public international law, it is not a separate body of law that stands outside, let\'s say, the Singapore legal system, which is applied only by international courts, for example, or between states in their disputes. Rather, the conflict of laws or private international law is applied by domestic courts to domestic disputes that come before its courts. Andrew Yip (02:09.269) just to disputes which happen to have an international dimension, for which the unqualified assertion of domestic jurisdiction or the unqualified application of domestic law seems inappropriate. So one thing we should note, or which should be obvious just from the description of the conflict of laws is It is not a body of substantive rules of law in the sense that contract law, tort law, unjust enrichment, equity, criminal law, even or property law, it\'s not like these fields of law. It doesn\'t contain rules that determine the outcome of legal disputes themselves. Rather, what the conflict of laws consists of are rules which determine which of these rules should apply. The conflict of laws doesn\'t contain, let\'s say, substantive rules which govern contracts. Rather, it tells you which courts should determine a contractual dispute or which body of law of a national legal system, be it Singapore law, English law, Malaysian law, Chinese law, American law, which of these bodies of laws should apply to a single legal dispute. For a little bit more detail on how the conflict of laws works, we need to sort of see how it works at each stage of the civil litigation process. So we can call the conflict of laws as it operates through the civil litigation process, the conflicts process. And it impacts upon civil litigation at four stages. First, at the jurisdictional stage, the conflict of laws intervenes to determine whether or not Singapore\'s courts should even hear a dispute with an international element. So we have questions as to whether or not the defendant is in Singapore or the defendant is outside Singapore when courts should cease jurisdiction over parties in their dispute. So jurisdiction is the first question that any court asks when it comes to the institution of civil proceedings. But between jurisdiction and Andrew Yip (04:15.628) well, the submissions of statements of claims and defences, there is a very long interlocutory process before parties get to trial. And at the interlocutory stage, the complex process also intervenes, notably by determining whether or not proceedings that are ongoing in other jurisdictions should be halted by Singapore\'s courts, not exactly by an order issued against the foreign court, but issued against the parties before the Singapore proceedings to stop proceedings in a foreign court. These orders are called anti -suit injunctions and we\'ll explore these next. Third, if Singapore\'s courts are here to dispute, there is a question as to what law should govern the dispute before Singapore\'s courts. Just because Singapore\'s courts here to dispute doesn\'t mean they\'re gonna apply Singapore law. In many situations, that will be wildly inappropriate. Even if Singapore\'s courts are adjudicating over a dispute of international elements, there is the question as to whether or not Singapore law or foreign law should apply. The rules which determine whether or not Singapore or foreign law should apply are called choice of law rules and they apply at trial on the merits of the dispute. Finally, after trial has happened, whether in Singapore or overseas, and a judgment is rendered, the question is whether or not Singapore\'s courts should enforce a local judgement or, more relevant for our purposes, a foreign judgement. And at this stage, the conflict of laws rules on whether or not a foreign judgement should be recognised and enforced in Singapore\'s courts become relevant. So the conflict process proceeds in four stages. The jurisdictional stage, the interlocutory stage, at the merits and at the post -trial stage. Andrew Yip (05:58.06) So that\'s kind of a brief description about the conflict of laws which we will be spending the rest of this course exploring. Now a little bit about the course itself and the scope of it. As with most other Part B courses, this is going to be a very brief, very bare introductory course meant to acquaint you with the essentials of the field for practice. And as an introductory course, it will cover\... only the bare essentials of the conflicts process, right? The conflict of laws is a very rich field and in most law schools, this will take up an entire module, sometimes a compulsory module, sometimes a massive elective, and sometimes something that you might take in your third year as for half of the entire of a year. It\'s a large course covering a very, very large body of law. And I can\'t do justice to the whole, to the details of any aspect of this field of law in this course. What I\'m going to give instead is a very skeletal outline of the conflicts process, highlighting the most essential issues and the most essential doctrines of law that you need to know in most of the disputes that you might have to deal with in practice. So moving on from this, because we are going to cover only the bare essentials of the conflicts process, we\'re going to focus only on select common law conflict of laws rules. In Singapore, as in many other jurisdictions, the conflict of laws is increasingly being augmented by statutes governing various questions. various issues arising from jurisdiction clauses, the recognition of foreign judgements, and even choice of law rules. In Singapore, there is a common law base upon which these statutes have built, and that is going to be by and large the focus of our course here, because if I had to cover these augmenting statutory rules, well, I would never be able to cover this within the short span of this course, but I will make reference to these rules when\... Andrew Yip (07:58.486) I should, when appropriate, just so you know that they exist out there in practice and that you should refer to them in practice. One exception to this is the jurisdictional rules for defendants outside Singapore, which is almost entirely statutory, which we have to refer to the statutory framework for. But for other topics, we will concentrate mostly on the common law rules. Third and finally, the conflict of laws covers the entire gamut of private law. They are Conflict of laws rules for property disputes, equitable disputes, disputes involving unjust enrichments, disputes involving insolvency and many, many others, family disputes, many, many others. So covering the whole breadth of conflicts rules will again take us far beyond the scope of this course and far beyond what you really need to know as a first year associate in practice. So for brevity\'s sake, I will concentrate on the two. kinds of claims you can bring which invoke the conflict process which are most commonly brought practice which are conflict, sorry, are contract claims and tort claims. Andrew Yip (09:13.792) So the lectures are going to proceed as follows. After this brief introductory lecture, we will dive straight into choice of law, exploring the choice of law rules that determine which laws govern a dispute at trial. Then we\'ll move on to jurisdiction, determining which courts have jurisdiction over a particular dispute. We will then move on to anti -suit injunctions. The prominent order that the conflict of laws issues in interlactuary stages of proceedings. And finally, we will cover the law on when a Singapore court should recognise and enforce a foreign judgement. We\'re covering choice of law first, even though it kind of should be placed between anti -suit injunctions and foreign judgements, because the choice of law rules of the conflict of laws are\... the oldest and other rules in the conflict of laws have grown up around choice of law rules, particularly rules on jurisdiction. So it makes sense and it\'s easier for us to understand the rest of the rules in the conflict of laws if we understand first choice of law. Andrew Yip (10:16.448) And finally, before we end this lecture, a few practical tips on how to study for this course. The reading list I\'ve given you is short and for almost every case I have assigned you, I\'ve tried to pinpoint the exact paragraph that you have to read, right? Not of course counting the facts that you might need to understand for each case which are background facts which you sort of should suss out for yourself and will cover for yourself, but the\... Essential paragraphs which contain the ratio and the reasoning in the cases which are essential to understanding these doctrines are pinpointed for you. I\'ve also kept the cases to a minimum, so please do read the cases. I won\'t be going into the cases in detail in the lecture. So for some doctrines, the proposition will be self -evident. It will say, if X happens, Y is the outcome. In that case, you don\'t really need a case to tell you how the doctrine is going to be applied. But there\'s certain other cases which involve multi -factorial analyses and tests. And in those cases, the case law is very, very important. So please read the cases, especially on those issues. As mentioned, the conflict of law is a sort of body of law which appends to the civil process and which is relevant at each stage of civil proceedings. So it makes sense to study the conflict of laws in tandem studying the civil procedure as you will in this Part B course as well. There are various aspects of the law of jurisdiction involving service which only makes sense if you understand service as it occurs in the law of civil procedure. There are various aspects of the anti -suit injunction which will have similarities to the Mareva injunction which you will study in civil procedure as well and there are aspects of the law of fraud judgments which are similar to the enforcement of domestic judgments which again you will study in civil procedure. So it makes sense to go through Andrew Yip (12:07.438) two modules together and to sort of digest these topics together because they complement each other. One is really the international dimension of the other. Finally, More important or as important as studying the detailed rules of the conflict of laws is kind of getting a feel for how the conflict of laws operates. The conflict of laws is not a body of laws that determines substantive outcomes. Rather, it\'s a body of law that determines how courts should identify the rules that in turn leads them to these substantive outcomes. Conflict of Laws - Lecture 1: Intro - conflict of laws consists of are rules which determine which of these rules should apply.