Permissive Rules in Private International Law. A Critical Study

In order to study the paradoxical phenomenon of the rise of party autonomy in parallel with the multiplication of mandatory norms in contemporary private international law, the concept of permissive rule is particularly apposite. It accounts for all instances where the law-making body grants a beneficiary the possibility to do or not to do something; be it the judge when he is authorized to stay the proceedings in case of related actions, or the parties when they are authorized to choose the law applicable to an international contract.

A study of the positive law shows that permissive rules are numerous in both Choice of laws and Jurisdiction and that they operate under distinct logics depending on whether they grant a possibility to a judge or to the parties. In the latter case, the issue at stake is no longer whether a right is granted by the legal rule, but rather whether a right is conceded in the choice of the legal rule. This specificity, together with the proliferation of permissive rules in private international law, warrants that their relevancy be tested.

In this context, the assumption that permissive norms would adequately serve the purpose of foreseeability of solutions, which forms the basis for their adoption, must be questioned.  This critical assessment leads to the proposal that permissive norms should, in the future, play only a residual role in private international law, either as a way to reach consensus or as a stopgap in the absence of a sufficiently foreseeable connecting factor