Abstract
Beginning in 1963, U.S. conflict-of-laws principles began to alter drastically. On its way out was the vested rights theory that produced fairly certain rules, such as the place-of-the-injury rule for tort cases, and on their way in were a host of modern theories including interest analysis, the Second Restatement of Conflicts' most significant relationship test and Leflar's choice-influencing considerations. This article studies the result patterns in 802 U.S. tort conflict-of-laws cases. It concludes that the modern theories are much more likely to produce results that favor plaintiffs, the application of local law and the law that favors local parties. The modern theories also largely work in a similar fashion, despite significant verbal differences between them.