Businesses, lawyers and courts navigating cross-border disputes have long faced a fragmented global landscape, with no single resource offering structured, comparable information on how different jurisdictions treat parties' freedom to choose the law applicable to their contracts. The Choice of Law Dataverse (CoLD) project at the University of Lucerne set out to address this shortcoming. Developed between 2023 and 2026, CoLD is a freely accessible online database covering the law governing choice of law in international commercial contracts across more than 100 legal systems. Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and led by Professor Daniel Girsberger and Agatha Brandão, the research project also included contributors from South Africa, Canada and India, among other locations.

A platform built for practice

The real power of CoLD lies in its usability. With a few clicks, a user can establish whether courts in Australia, China or Morocco recognise choice-of-law agreements, under what conditions they do so, and what limits apply. The platform provides comparable country information, links to national legal sources and specialist literature, and allows the direct comparison of different legal regimes. At its core is an AI-powered Case Analyser, which rapidly extracts relevant passages from court rulings and arbitration decisions.

Open and ready to use

CoLD is published under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY 4.0), meaning it can be freely used, redistributed and built upon, including for commercial purposes. The platform's combination of scholarly rigour and practical accessibility was recognised in November 2025, when the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences awarded CoLD the Swiss National Prize for Open Research Data. The project was officially launched at the University of Lucerne in late April, with a platform demonstration and a scholarly debate on party autonomy in international contracts.

This article is an abbreviated version of a previous article published in the 2025 Annual Report.