it is an honor to be asked to write the foreword to Professor Symeon Symeonides’s
new book. I have known his work for more than 20 years, and he is one of the foremost
scholars in the world in the field of the conflict of laws. His work has been cited by federal
and state courts in the United States and by the House of Lords and the Supreme Court
in the United Kingdom.
This is a truly monumental contribution to the study of codification in the conflict of
laws. When I first came to the subject of the conflict of laws in the 1960s, codification was
in a state of arrested development. There had been the civil law codes of the nineteenth
century, which had dealt with some aspects of choice of law, such as the French Civil
Code in 1804, and its successors later in the century, especially in Spain and Germany.
There was also the Bustamante Code in Latin America.
The attempts by the Hague Conference at unification by international convention had
met with only limited success, and the enormously distinguished authors of the American
Law Institute Restatements of the Conflict of Laws, the first by Professor Beale and the
second by Professor Reese, failed to achieve unqualified acceptance.