Huxley, the eminent Victorian biologist, delighted in saying that whatever merits his English prose style might have were due in large part to the fact that he had escaped the training in Latin and Greek which at that time formed the chief basis of English education. It may well be that whatever merits the contents of the present work may have are due largely to the fact that when the author went to law school, courses in the Conflict of Laws were, if offered, usually not taken by most law students. It thus came about that when he was asked (in 1919) to teach the subject to law students, he had not been educated in the dogma then current, based, as it was, largely on the theories of Story and Dicey. He thus approached the subject with a more open mind than might otherwise have been the case. In addition, what little he had learned of the subject led him to refrain from reading the treatises until he had studied the cases in Beale’s Cases on the Conflict of Laws, and had formed tentative conclusions of his own as to what the problems were and how they might be solved. When, after this, he consulted the treatises and law review articles, he found that he was obviously a heretic: it seemed to him that nearly all writers were obsessed with indefensible theories which neither accounted for what the courts were doing nor led to useful decisions if logically applied.
—Walter Wheeler Cook, The Logical and Legal Bases of the Conflict of Laws