Cite as: 516 U. S. 217 (1996)
Opinion of the Court
ject to reparation. It was not possible to find a satisfactory solution to this double problem, and the CITEJA esteemed that this question of private international law should be regulated independantly [sic] from the present Convention." Report of the Third Session of CITEJA by Henry de Vos (Sept. 25, 1928), reprinted in Second International Conference on Private Aeronautical Law Minutes, Warsaw 1929, p. 255 (R. Horner & D. Legrez transl. 1975).
Both these statements make clear that the questions of who may recover, and what compensatory damages they may receive, were regarded as intertwined; and that both were unresolved by the Convention and left to "private international law"—i. e., to the area of jurisprudence we call "conflict of laws," dealing with the application of varying domestic laws to disputes that have an interstate or international component.
We are unpersuaded by petitioners' reliance on the comment of French delegate Georges Ripert, asserting, as one basis for rejecting application of domestic law to the issue of carriers' vicarious liability, that it would be "the first time that application of national law is required." Id., at 66. Reply Brief for Petitioners 2-3. Not only does this remark not have the authority of submissions by the drafting committee, but it is a generalization rather than a statement focused specifically upon the issue here: what law governs the "category of damages subject to reparations." And the generalization is demonstrably wrong to boot, since it is incontrovertible that Article 24 of the Convention requires the application of national law to some issues.
The postratification conduct of the contracting parties displays the same understanding that the damages recoverable—so long as they consist of compensation for harm incurred (dommage survenu)—are to be determined by domestic law. Some countries, including England, Germany and the Netherlands, have adopted domestic legislation to
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