Contingencies in the Rise of European and Latin American Private International Law, 1850 to 1950

Abstract

There were eight Latin American and European calls for the formation of multilateral private international law from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. These calls are the birth of the multilateral tradition of private international law. This chapter will examine the contingencies behind the successes and failures of these eight attempts for multilateral codification. Among those impactful contingencies making their mark on the private international legal histories of Europe and Latin America are voluntarism, political influence exerted by the convenor, the international relations between the convening, invited, or participatory nations, the drafting procedure and the level of private international legal harmonisation among national legal systems. Then there were more regionally specific contingencies such as a European cholera outbreak as opposed to colonial trauma and post-independence solidarity amongst Latin American nations. The central doctrinal debate in both the Latin American and European multilateral private international legal movements surrounded personal law, specifically, the clash between nationality and domicile. Doctrinal preferences, like multilateral movements, were littered with contingencies related to whether the nation in question was an immigrant or emigrant country, whether it had been the coloniser or the colonised in the recent historical past, and the impacts of the World Wars.