A Digest of the Law of England with Reference to the Conflict of Laws

Dicey's innovation was to treat the conflict of laws as a branch of English law, not as a body of international or cosmopolitan rules. He stated the law in the form of numbered rules, each justified by reference to decided cases, following the model of a legal digest rather than a treatise . This inductive, case-law method was a deliberate departure from continental writers like Story and Savigny, who built systems from general principles. Dicey's approach aligned with the English common-law tradition: theory should follow from practice, not the other way around .

Dicey formulated six general principles in his introduction, the most famous being the recognition of vested rights acquired under foreign law. These principles were not starting points for deduction but rather generalizations suggested by decided cases and judicial dicta . Dicey described them as expressing the grounds on which reported decisions may logically be made to rest, and as principles toward which the decisions of English courts gradually tend, rather than premises from which judges start . They gave his digest a theoretical spine without abandoning its empirical method.

Dicey argued that comity — the idea that courts apply foreign law as a courtesy to foreign sovereigns — is incoherent and unnecessary. English courts recognize rights acquired under foreign judgments not to please the French President, but because it seems the best way, or the only way, of doing justice to the parties . Comity, Dicey maintained, throws no light on the nature of the rules upheld by English courts. His alternative is that the conflict of laws is simply English law applied to cases with a foreign element, no more and no less.

The Digest was Dicey's first major work, and he was still preparing it in 1896 when he wrote to Bryce: 'What a queer thing life is. Why should I ever have become involved in this conflict of laws?' . He later wrote The Law of the Constitution and Law and Public Opinion, but contemporaries regarded the Digest as equal to them. Geldart, his successor at Oxford, said Dicey had not only reduced to order one of the most intricate and technical branches of English law but exerted a potent influence on its development .

The Digest went through four editions in Dicey's lifetime (1896, 1908, 1922, 1927), with A. Berriedale Keith as co-editor from the second edition onward . After Dicey's death, John Morris edited the sixth edition in 1949, and the work was renamed Dicey's Conflict of Laws in the seventh edition . From the eighth edition in 1967, it became Dicey and Morris on the Conflict of Laws, with Otto Kahn-Freund revolutionizing the torts chapter from nine pages to forty-six . It remains a standard practitioner text today.

A common misconception treats the Digest as a purely descriptive restatement of settled law. In fact, Dicey's propositions were often prospective as well as retrospective — the Spectator noted in 1896 that some of its concise and clear propositions would acquire the force of law by formal judicial approval . Dicey's method of stating rules in definite form, even where authority was doubtful, meant the Digest shaped the law it purported only to describe. It was a guide and counsellor for judges, not merely a repertory for practitioners .