The Hague Conference and the Future of Private International Law – A Jubilee Speech

Anniversaries are days for remembrance of the past, for assessing the challenges of the present and for contemplating options for the future. Addressing these tasks I shall first take a look at the wider context of private international law and its embeddedness in the historic evolution of society, the economy and the international community (at I.). That evolution has created the need for a reliable transnational legal framework of private cross-border relations, something which is perceived anew under the impact of globalization in the present era. It primarily concerns the coordination of legal systems, i.e. the fields of cooperation between States (at II.) and choice of law (at III.). While the coordination methods implicitly accept the divergence of national legal systems, an increasing tendency aims at replacing them with common laws and values (at IV.). The observations in these areas are conducive to recommendations for future orientation. At the very end, the institutional basis of the discipline deserves closer attention (at V.).