As a result, Americans have accumulated "vast judicial experience in resolving conflicts cases".
[4] During the first half of the 20th century, the traditional conflict of laws approach came under criticism from some members of the U.S. legal community who saw it as rigid and arbitrary; the traditional method sometimes forced application of the laws of a state with no connection to either party, except that a tort or contract claim arose between the parties in that state.
[5] This period of intellectual ferment (which coincided with the rise of the legal realism movement) gave birth to a number of innovative new approaches.
This test has been criticized for failing to respect the sovereignty of the state in which the cause of action arose, and because courts can tip the balance in one way or another in deciding which contacts are significant.
It is the brainchild of University of Chicago law professor Brainerd Currie, who outlined the test in a series of articles during the 1950s and 1960s.
[7] Currie's revolutionary work "dominated American choice-of-law thinking in the United States for almost half a century".
[9] Currie aggressively defended this outcome, but as Arthur Taylor von Mehren observed, widespread adoption of his style of analysis at the international and interstate levels would result in "a legal order characterized by chaos and retaliation".
Use of the "better rule" test, like renvoi, is frowned upon because it appears to be little more than a gimmick to allow a court to apply the law of its own state.
The plaintiff had sued a New York reinsurer of a Mexican corporation that was primarily insured in Mexico, which is where the "injury" had occurred when a tugboat owned by the company was lost in a fire.
This was reaffirmed in Watson v. Employers Liability Assurance Corp., 348 U.S. 66 (1954) held that neither the Full Faith and Credit Clause nor the Fourteenth Amendment was implicated when a couple who had bought an insurance policy in Illinois and then moved to Louisiana sued the issuer of the policy under a provision in the Louisiana law that permitted such suits.
Allstate Insurance Co. v. Hague, 449 U.S. 302 (1981) determined that the same analysis applies to both the Full Faith and Credit Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment; and that both are satisfied so long as there are sufficient aggregate contacts between the forum and the event giving rise to the cause of action.
She sued the insurance company to recover a higher amount permitted under Minnesota law, and the courts agreed that this was permissible, because of the combination of the decedent's employment contacts with the state, and the insurance company's commercial contacts with the state.