The Dark Science of Conflict

For 63 years, the Order of the Coif* has awarded coveted gold Coif Keys to some of the country's brightest law students. Last week the legal fraternity began honoring another kind of excellence: legal writing. The need is clear. At its jargon-free best, legal literature inspires the court decisions that shape U.S. society. Yet legal writers usually toil obscurely for arcane law reviews. Even when they publish books, their reward is likely to be petty cash and a paucity of public praise.

The new Triennial Coif Award ($1,000) is for legal writing "that evidences creative talent of the highest order." Selected by six leading legal lights, such as Justice Roger J. Traynor of the California Supreme Court, the first recipient is Duke University's shy, witty, brilliant Law Professor Brainerd Currie, 52, author of 1963's Selected Essays on the Conflict of Laws, a seminal, formidable tome that Currie characteristically dedicated "To My Wife, who has suffered more from these essays than any mere reader can."

Casbah Fellow. A native Georgian, Scholar Currie broke all academic records at Mercer University Law School ('35), was the OPA lawyer who led the crackdown on black-market lumber chiselers during World War II. He has taught at the universities of Georgia, Chicago, California and Pittsburgh, where he was law dean in 1952. He has edited such journals as Law and Contemporary Problems, been a fellow at California's famed Casbah (Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences). While delighting law professors with doggerel mockeries of celebrated lawsuits, Currie has built his serious reputation on profound studies of U.S. law's major problem: the conflicts that arise among the legal systems of 50 states and the Federal Government.

Among dozens of examples, Currie's book analyzes the case of a Chicago businessman who on occasion visited New York, where he employed a secretary with whom he became intimate. She had his baby in a Chicago hospital, where she signed a support agreement releasing him from all further obligation. After two years in California, she returned to New York and sued him there for additional support. He pleaded the Illinois agreement as a complete defense. Which state's laws should the New York court have applied?

Legitimate Interests. Until a few decades ago, the standard answer would have been the "vested rights" doctrine that courts should choose the law of the place of contracting. The New York court did apply Illinois law, and the girl lost her suit--but under the modern "center of gravity" doctrine, which defers to the state having the most "contacts" in the case. Was this fair?

Obviously not, says Currie, whose major contribution is the "governmental interests" doctrine that settles conflicts according to which state has the most interest in each particular case. In this one, argues Currie, New York was most affected because of its paramount interest in the welfare of resident children. Since the embattled secretary's child could have become a public charge, Currie would have applied New York law, under which the girl could have won. Each state, he says, "should apply its own law to effectuate its own legitimate interests, defined with moderation and restraint in the light of the interests of other states."

Though still controversial, Currie's doctrine is a more rational approach that courts are using increasingly. To Harvard Law Professor John P. Dawson, who presented the first Coif Award to Currie at a banquet in Chicago last week, "it seems clear that after Brainerd Currie, that dark science called the conflict of laws can never be the same."

* After the white caps once worn by the English royal barristers called serjeants at law.

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