Conflict of laws

It was clear that in construing a jurisdiction clause, a broad and purposive construction had to be followed: if there was no rational basis upon which businessmen would be likely to wish to have questions of the validity or enforceability of the contract decided by one tribunal and questions about its performance decided by another, very clear language would need to be found before deciding that they had had such an intention. When looking at a complex series of agreements, it was necessary to construe an agreement which was part of a series of agreements by taking into account the overall scheme of the agreements and reading sentences and phrases in the context of that overall scheme. Where there were multiple related agreements whether a dispute fell within the jurisdiction clauses of one or more related agreements, depended upon the intention of the parties