Private International Law Public Law Extraterritorial Research

First of all, it's not reasonable to define the extraterritorial effect of law as the application of foreign laws by domestic courts. In my opinion, the extraterritorial effect of law comes into being once a law is taken into consideration while the process of choice of law is going on, whatever the result of the choice of law would be.During a fairly long time, the legal effect of laws of a nation had been limited to the territory where the nation's sovereignty covered. Such situation or tradition changed centuries later with the development of early capitalist economy. Around 13th century, with the emerge of the doctrine of statuta, also know as the first theoretical form of International Private Law, nations began to recognize each other the extraterritorial effect of private laws.Nevertheless, with the further development of new economy, the extraterritorial effect of law is expanding into areas of public laws. The advance of the process of economy globalization is the essential driving force of the extraterritorial application of public laws. The integration of public laws and private laws to a certain extent clears the way for the expansion of public laws' extraterritorial effect.So far, the extraterritorial application of public law mostly takes place in areas of economic legislation. And economic legislation as a whole belongs to public law. In 1890, Congress of the United States granted 《Sherman Act》with extraterritorial effect, which standed for the beginning of extraterritorial application of economic law. Initially, many countries including its allies in Europe strongly oppose America's such unilateral act. However, their efforts to attempt to block extraterritorial application of America's economic legislation turned out to be failure. These countries soon changed their attitudes and granted their economic legislation with extraterritorial effect as well. Thus, conflict of different countries' economic laws is inevitable and specific rules to solve legal conflict of this kind are called for. With frequent extraterritorialapplication of economic law, some principles are layed down, like "the effects doctrine", "jurisdictional rule of reason", and "single economic unit".We're glad that International Private Law in many nations, like Swiss Federal Act on International Private Law, has recognize the extraterritorial application of foreign public laws. Court rulings of many nations also support the extraterritorial application of foreign public laws.International Private Law is now dealing with conflict of private laws as well as that of public laws and is facing unprecedented opportunities and challenges.