No-Fault Insurance and the Conflict of Laws—An Interim Update

In an article published in the Duke Law Journal in June of 1972, Professor Kozyris proposed a choice of law system for no-fault which would resolve in a novel way the confusion engendered by disparate state approaches to the problems of compensation and liability for injuries resulting from automobile accidents, by tying the extent and nature of both the victim\u27s recovery and the driver\u27s liability to the respective laws of their states of domicil-regardless of the place of the accident. During the period subsequent to the publication of that article, the proposed federal standard no-fault bill has been modified to reflect substantial deference to the domiciliary concept in its choice of law provisions, while the various state plans adopted have continued to reflect a notable preference for a territorialist approach. In this article, Professor Kozyris favorably analyzes the choice of law provisions of the proposed federal bill. In a less encouraging vein, his demonstration of the anomalous results generated by the territorialism of some of the recently enacted state plans suggests that a rational and consistent choice of law scheme for the interstate automobile accident may be a long way off if the federal bill is not enacted

Justified Party Expectations in Choice-of-Law and Jurisdiction: Constitutional Significance or Bootstrapping

This Article examines the role that a party\u27s legal and factual expectations play in determining the reach of a state\u27s power over them. The author argues that perceptions of fairness are substituted for the actual volition of the parties to be validated through other means, whereas the parties\u27 factual expectations do carry weight in determining the reach of a state\u27s power of over them. The author suggests that recent Supreme Court decisions on jurisdictional due process employ a methodology that satisfactorily distinguishes between expectations of law and fact. The author contrasts this approach with that taken in Allstate Insurance Co. v. Hague, in which the Court reconstructed and relied on hypothetical expectations which did not materialize, and suggests that its import should be limited on its facts to the insurance field