Party autonomy and insurance contracts in private international law : a European Gordian knot

The present work builds upon the doctoral dissertation defended in March 2014 at the Department of Law of the University of Genoa, on the role of party autonomy in private international law in insurance matters. As known, such a field is the subject matter of numerous and in-depth studies. However, in spite of such a detailed and punctual attention of scholars, the private international law of insurance matters still remains a highly debated topic, where uniform solutions are difficult to be unanimously accepted. The numerous issues that characterize this field are taken into consideration analysed in the present work, whose aim is contribute to the learned discussions of the legal scholarship in this field. More specifically, the work wishes to contribute to the legal debate on the reform of the system by proposing, as opposed to the most of the current writings, a solution that cannot be defined as a profound one, but that might temporarily resolve some of the current problems and “build a bridge” to fill some of the existing gaps and inconsistencies up until that point when a true (desirable) “revolution of the private international law in insurance matters” proposed by some authors will be possible.