Divorce in the Canadian Conflict of Laws: Two Recent Developments

Abstract

Two recent cases have added substantially to the Canadian jurisprudence on divorce in the conflict of laws. In one, discussed in Part I of this article, a court of first instance in Alberta initiated what is likely to be a far-reaching change in the rules for the recognition of foreign decrees. In the other, discussed in Part II, the Supreme Court of Canada gave its imprimatur for the first time to the controversial doctrine whereby someone who has obtained an invalid foreign decree may be precluded from denying its validity in a Canadian court. Although the two questions that these cases deal with are quite separate, their treatment by the Alberta Supreme Court and the Supreme Court of Canada shows a common tendency to resolve conflicts problems by rules that are general and flexible rather than precise and arbitrary.