The concept of a conflict-of-laws problem in international private law and the main ways of its solution

The article analyzes the conflict-of-laws problem in international private law and examines the ways and main approaches to its solution. The article proves that modern private international law ceases to be a purely conflict of laws, that is, the law of the collision (conflict) of national legal systems and turns into the law of interaction of national private legal systems, within which cooperation prevails over the collision. The article determines the essence of the conflict-of-laws issue, which consists in the fact that it is necessary to determine the law of which state should be applied to a specific legal relationship complicated by a foreign element: the law of the state to which the foreign element belongs or the law of the country of the court. The research establishes that in private international law, the solution of a conflict-of-laws problem is possible by applying one of the following three approaches: substantive law approach, or multilateral (bilateral) approach and unilateral approach. The study reveals that the basis of the first, substantive law approach, which is considered historically the first, is not the choice of one of the existing legal systems, but the formulation of a new set of substantive-legal norms adapted to the regulation of cross-border relations. The article argues that in the modern world such approaches cannot be applied, since this can lead to complete arbitrariness of the law enforcement officer, who, for obvious reasons, in most cases prefers the lex fori norm, which is well known to him. The research also identifies another approach to the current conflict-of-laws problem in the current international law, which is the dominant one in European international private law – multilateral (bilateral) approach – which is directly aimed at assessing the status of both domestic and foreign substantive law. The work argues for the importance of the third approach to the growing conflict-of-laws problem in current international private law, which we consider to be a unilateral approach. The investigation proves that according to this approach, the starting point is the norm of substantive law itself. The paper concludes that the multilateral (bilateral) and unilateral approaches can be combined into a group of conflict-of-laws approaches, since both are based on the premise that a cross-border dispute is a potential conflict between the substantive legal norms of different states, and this conflict can be resolved by choosing the substantive legal norms of only one state.