Abstract
As the name of this Symposium suggests, the Restatement (Second) of Conflict of Laws has been with us for a quarter of a century. In some senses it has been around longer. The American Law Institute began the endeavor in 1952 and approved it in May 1969. In draft form, the Second Restatement attracted early attention from courts, including a prominent citation in the New York Court of Appeals pathbreaking 1963 Babcock v. Jackson decision. With good reason, Babcock is viewed as the beginning of the conflicts revolution, and, thus, the Second Restatement has been a prominent feature of the conflicts revolution since the beginning.
Like the revolution itself, the project of re-restating American conflicts law was controversial. Although the first Restatement of Conflict of Laws, adopted in 1934, was under attack from its beginning, it represented a synthesis of a stable, territorial, multilateral choice-of-law system whose American roots dated at least to Justice Story's 1834 treatise, and whose European ancestry predated Story by centuries. Even among those who favored modification or abandonment of the multilateral system embodied in the First Restatement, however, the Second Restatement came in for criticism.