Why Do You Need CoLD?

CoLD is a Repository
CoLD contains carefully curated private international law data, helping experts stay up to date on legal changes across the world.

CoLD is a Community
Our main objective is to transform data points into knowledge through collaboration within a community.

CoLD is Open Research
The Dataverse promotes sharing, preserving, citing, exploring and analyzing research data on choice of law. CoLD is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

The core subject of CoLD is of significant importance to the resolution of real-world international commercial disputes. Rules of law chosen by the parties (or otherwise identified as applicable by judges or arbitrators) can significantly impact the outcome of a case before courts or an arbitral tribunal, and a framework on how to choose these rules is therefore necessary.

Undertaking research in this area across fragmented databases is very burdensome to legal practitioners and scholars. When a dispute arises, clients ultimately bear the costs. These costs stand to be reduced—and access to justice thereby stands to be improved—where legal practitioners have access to a Dataverse.

The discipline in which this research project is inserted is private international law, also known as conflict of laws. It refers to a set of rules of law (of domestic, regional, international or supranational nature) that can determine (i) which court has jurisdiction and (ii) which law governs a given legal transaction or dispute. Our research is concerned solely with the second aspect, i.e., the determination of the applicable law.