Why Use the Restatements of the Law?

Restatements of the Law

What Are the Restatements of the Law?

In 1923 a group of important American judges, law professors, and lawyers founded the American Law Institute (" ALI ") with the goal of simplifying the body of U.S. case law by " restating" or summarizing it in an organized manner. They wanted to reduce the number of sources that had to be checked in order to determine what the law was. To do this, the ALI selected a number of prominent scholars as " Reporters" for each of the subjects to be restated. These Reporters selected the " best" cases in their areas of expertise, summarized their rules, and organized those rules logically by issue. The result was a set of highly authoritative secondary sources called the Restatements of the Law.

The ALI has created four series of Restatements. The first series, written between 1923 and 1944, covered the topics agency, conflict of laws, contracts, judgments, property, restitution, security, torts, and trusts. In 1957 the ALI began work on the second series, which revised the Restatements on agency, conflict of laws, contracts, judgments, property, torts, and trusts, and created a new Restatement on foreign relations law. In 1986 the ALI began issuing its third series of Restatements. The third series revised many of the subjects of the earlier ones but added new ones as well. It also subdivided topics like Property and Torts into subjects like " Property: Servitudes" and " Torts: Products Liability." For the fourth series, ALI has begun work on a revised Restatement of the law of foreign relations law. In addition, ALI has a series of " Principles of [various topics of law]. Those are beyond the scope of this lesson.

The ALI distributes tentative drafts of all in-progress Restatements. However, tentative drafts are not authoritative and are therefore not usually relied upon by courts.

Why Use the Restatements of the Law?

Although the Restatements are not binding on the courts, most judges find them highly persuasive. They are therefore good authorities to cite when you can't find any case law directly on point. According to the ALI's 2011-12 Annual Report, the Restatements had been cited in judicial opinions 188, 000 times as of June 2012. It is not unusual for judges to " adopt" individual Restatement rules in their opinions, thus making the adopted rules binding in future cases within the same jurisdiction.

Another reason you might want to use the Restatements in your research is that they can help you find relevant cases using methods discussed later in this lesson.

Quiz 1. Who is publishing – American Law Institute.

Quiz 2. Are restatements generally binding for courts? – No.