The article deals with legal gender from the conflict-of-laws perspective. Its aims are: to identify the law applicable to the establishment (upon birth) and change of legal gender under Polish private international law, to determine that law’s scope of application, and to indicate the values that should be taken into account when considering the intervention of the ordre public. Given the gap existing in Polish PIL in matters of legal gender, the applicable law should be searched for on the basis of a generic rule of art. 67 of the Polish PIL Act. In my opinion, under that rule, it is the national law of a person that should be considered to be the law applicable to that person’s legal gender. However, the establishment or change of legal gender that occurred abroad may be qualified as “a closed legal situation.” Thus, the law determined by the relevant rule of that situation’s state of origin may be deemed the applicable one. The laws applicable to the potential impact of the legal gender’s change on marriage, name and surname, filiation and succession should be searched for separately. If the change of legal gender is inadmissible under the applicable law, the public policy exception may be used in order to allow such change, based on the individual’s right to respect for their sexual self-determination, which is one of the aspects of the right to respect for private life under the ECHR. However, the decision to apply the public policy exception should always be preceded by an assessment in concreto. This also concerns dealing with a foreign rule that provides for “the third gender” being assigned to a child. The child’s best interests and the values related to the cross-border continuity of a personal legal status should be taken into account in this regard.

Over the centuries, the preference for a conflict-of-laws methodology was subject to twists and turns. A number of methods coexisted and continue to compete today. First, the unilateralism involves determining the spatial scope of application of either the forum’s own law or foreign law. This is achieved through the use of one-sided choice-of-law rules or through the functional interpretation of specific substantive provisions. Second, the multilateralism assumes a neutral and territorial localization of the legal situation in question. It seeks to identify the legal system most closely connected to the matter, based on objective connecting factors. The third approach, which is sufficiently distinct from the first two to warrant separate analysis, boils down to recognition of legal events crystallized under foreign law. The article reviews some of the most important trends and developments in the conflict-of-laws, occurring during the second half of the XX century and the first decades of the XXI century, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. At the outset, it briefly introduces characteristics of the multilateral method as understood in Europe and the unilateralism, focusing on its American version. An attempt is made to show how the unilateral and multilateral methods are intertwined in the US conflicts of laws, with a particular attention devoted to the draft of the Restatement (Third) of the Conflict of Laws. The attention is then transferred back to Europe, putting an emphasis on the expressions of unilateralism, not only in their classic forms of the public policy exceptions and overriding mandatory rules, but also hybrid instruments which essentially constitute a mixture of the multilateral technique and a substantive-result-orientation. The article deals also with recognition as a conflicts method, focusing on the recent case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union, which effectively ignores the conflict-of-laws analysis, because it is guided by a different imperative, namely to safeguard the free movement within the Union. The article concludes with a suggestion that — although the methodological starting points and accents undoubtedly differ on either side of the Atlantic — a common feature of contemporary developments in conflict-of-laws theory, both in Europe and the United States, is the blend of unilateral and multilateral approaches to solving the conflict-of-law problems. A fundamental distinction between European and American approaches, however, lies in the European reluctance to replace the multilateral method with a unilateral one. The prevailing view in Europe remains that unilateral methodologies may be employed only in exceptional cases, serving as supplementary or corrective mechanisms within the broader framework of traditional conflict-of-laws system, and only in relation to specific institutions or techniques designed to address particular deficiencies. The article posits, nevertheless, that the role of these mechanisms has gained increasing prominence within the traditional framework of private international law. Moreover, it is essential to recognize that they reflect a unilateral methodology grounded in a conceptual premise fundamentally distinct from that of traditional conflict-of-law rules based on neutral connecting factors. Specifically, this alternative approach centers on delineating the spatial scope of application of a substantive rule — whether domestic or foreign — that asserts its relevance, without resorting to a multilateral determination of the applicable law governing the legal relationship in question. The article also attempts to show how the American Restatement (Second) and the current Draft of the Restatement (Third) represent hybrid constructs that blend the “revolutionary” doctrines of interest analysis with elements that remain rooted in traditional, multilateral choice-of-law rules. The authors argue in this context, that while there is no inherent contradiction in combining unilateral and multilateral methodologies within a single conflict-of-laws framework, this can satisfactory be done only if the distinct methodologies are kept separate and understood as having very different premises, with a clear defined role and hierarchy within the system. Both the existing and planned Restatements fail to achieve clarity in that regard, as often reminded by the American conflict scholars themselves.