The blind spots of a legally heterogeneous world: an essay on the strategic exercise of will in contemporary private international law.

Summary Is it possible or even desirable to prevent a litigant from choosing a legal framework that is as favorable as possible to his interests? The law frames and limits individual will in areas where collective interests must take precedence. The internationality of a relationship, however, puts these limits into perspective and opens up a multitude of possibilities for litigants to develop a tailor-made legal framework. Private international law responds to the difficulties specific to the internationality of the relationship, but the complexity of certain situations defies the limits of the mechanisms made available by this discipline. Indeed, the control of individual choice is made more difficult by the exploitation, by private actors, not only of the variable content of the rules applicable to a certain relationship, but of the bodies of rules ancillary to the main relationship, in a legally heterogeneous world. The strategic exercise of will consists in the manipulation of the legal framework by a litigant in order to prevent the application of a law that is less favourable to his interests than the one he is able to substitute. By subjecting his situation to a legal framework of his choice, the litigant removes it from the field of vision of the original legal order, which will only review the situation when deciding on its effects. There is also a risk that the new solution developed by the litigant may not have been anticipated and regulated by the receiving legal system, or by any legal system called upon to issue a decision in relation to the situation. The interests at stake are thus not fully considered and balanced. Like a space that escapes the vision of an observer, certain aspects of the situation will therefore be in a blind spot, a phenomenon that this thesis will aim to describe and then consider treating.