Annual Brainerd Currie Lecture: How Modern Choice of Law Helped to Kill the Private Attorney General

This Essay will briefly explain Currie's approach to choice of law and its significant influence for modern choice-of-law approaches. It will then explain how one of those approaches, the Restatement (Second) of Conflict of Laws,3 both facilitated further state experimentation with choice-of-law policies and enabled private parties to gain some certainty regarding the governing law for contracts. This Essay will show how the choice-of-law clauses sanctioned in the Second Restatement work in tandem with other choice clauses to enable private parties to avoid undesired laws. Finally, this Essay will argue that the choice clauses have led to the demise of the private attorney general.