About approaches to understanding autonomy of the will in Private International Law

Abstract

The article analyzes a variety of approaches to understanding the autonomy of the will in Private International Law, including conflict of laws and substantive law, as well as views on the autonomy of the will as a derivative of freedom of contract, an independent private law transaction, a special method of regulating private law relations of an international nature and the result of the ability of law to be in feedback with public relations. Criticizing each of these approaches separately, but recognizing that some of them allow us to highlight the significant features of the autonomy of the will in Private International Law, the author proposes to make a conditional separation of the two stages (and forms) of its existence (and implementation): at the first stage – in the form of a substantive rule that authorizes, in certain cases and within strictly defined limits, the parties to a private law relationship with a foreign element to choose the applicable law; at the second stage – in the form of a quasinorm of a conflict of laws nature, directly established by the agreement of the parties to determine the applicable law