If one or both parties to a contract entered into it away from their home, or if a contract, or questions dependent upon it, come into litigation before a foreign tribunal, the construction of the contract, the rights that it gives, the obligations that it imposes, and the remedies which either party may have, may depend upon the law of the place where the contract was made, or the law of the domicil of the parties, or the law of the place where the thing to which the contract refers is situated, or the law of the tribunal before which the questions are litigated; or, to use the Latin phrases generally employed, the lex loci contractus, the lex domicilii, the lex loci rei sitae, and the lex fori.

The common law has left many of these questions unsettled; but the immense immigation into this country, the great and growing intercourse between it and foreign nations, and the extreme facility and frequency of foreign travel, and, more than this, the fact that our own nation is composed of thirty-six independent sovereignties, all combine to give to questions of this kind peculiar importance, and, on some points, peculiar difficulty. It will not be possible to exhaust the consideration of these topics within the space which can, in this work, be given to them. But an attempt will be made to present the leading principles which must determine all these questions. To few of them is there a precise and certain answer given by the common law; and some of them have not yet passed into adjudication. By writers on the civil and continental law of Europe, they have been, perhaps all of them, very fully considered; but with such a diversity, and irreconcilable contrariety * of conclusion, that we shall confine ourselves, as far as possible, to the common-law authorities. (a)

(a) Mr. Justice Story's large work on the Conflict of Laws is in a great measure composed of those conflicting statements; and in his closing paragraph he