LOCAL-LAW THEORY
local-law theory. Conflict of laws. The view that, although a court of the forum recognizes and enforces a local right (that is, one created under its own law), in a foreign-element case it does not necessarily apply the rule that would govern an analogous case of a purely domestic character, but instead takes into account the law of the foreign country by fashioning a local right as nearly as possible upon the law of the country in which the decisive facts have occurred. ? This theory is credited to Walter Wheeler Cook, who expounded it in the first chapter of his Logical and Legal Bases of the Conflict of Laws (1949).¡°Since the court of the forum adopts the view that the chosen law would have taken not of the actual case, but of an equivalent domestic case, it does not necessarily recognize the right that would have been vested in the plaintiff according to that law…. It is scarcely deniable, however, that this local law theory is little more than what a learned writer has stigmatized as a sterile truism ¡ª sterile because it affords no basis for the systematic development of private international law. To remind an English judge, about to try a case containing a foreign element, that whatever decision he gives he must enforce only the lex fori, is a technical quibble that explains nothing and solves nothing. It provides no guidance whatever upon the limits within which he must have regard to the foreign law.¡± G.C. Cheshire, Private International Law 35 (6th ed. 1961).
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