Historically, public international law and private international law have been treated as two different legal systems that function more or less independently. Public international law regulates activity among human beings operating in groups called, nation-states, while private international law regulates the activities of smaller subgroups or of individuals as they interact with each other. Since the public international legal system coordinates the interaction of collective human interests through decentralized mechanisms and private international law coordinates the interaction of individual or subgroup interests primarily through centralized mechanisms, these coordinating functions are usually carried out in different forums, each appropriate to the task. The differences between the processes by which sanctions for violation of community norms are applied in the two systems and the differences in the nature of the units making up the communities that establish those norms tend to obscure the fact that both the public and the private international systems coordinate human behavior, and that thus the values that inform both systems must necessarily be the same.
Comments on Professor Joan E. Donoghue's Article, "The Public Face of Private International Law: Prospects for a Convention on Foreign State Immunity"
