Principles are primarily addressed to legislatures, administrative agencies, or private actors. They can, however, be addressed to courts when an area is so new that there is little established law. Principles may suggest best practices for these institutions.

a. The nature of the Institute’s Principles projects. The Institute’s Corporate Governance Project was conceived as a hybrid, combining traditional Restatement in areas governed primarily by the common law, such as duty of care and duty of fair dealing, with statutory recommendations in areas primarily governed by statute. The project was initially called “Principles of Corporate Governance and Structure: Restatement and Recommendations,” but in the course of development the title was changed to “Principles of Corporate Governance: Analysis and Recommendations” and “Restatement” was dropped. Despite this change of title, the Corporate Governance Project combined Restatement with Recommendations and sought to unify a legal field without regard to whether the formulations conformed precisely to present law or whether they could readily be implemented by a court. In such a project, it is essential that the commentary make clear the extent to which the black-letter principles correspond to actual law and, if not, how they might most effectively be implemented as such. These matters were therefore carefully addressed at the beginning of each Comment, as they should be in any comparable “Principles” project.

The “Principles” approach was also followed in Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution: Analysis and Recommendations, the Institute’s first project in the field of family law. Rules and practice in this field vary widely from state to state and frequently confer broad discretion on the courts. The project therefore sought to promote greater predictability and fairness by setting out broad principles of sufficient generality to command widespread assent, while leaving many details to the local establishment of “rules of statewide application,” as explained in the following provision:

§ 1.01 Rules of Statewide Application

(1) A rule of statewide application is a rule that implements a Principle set forth herein and that governs in all cases presented for decision in the jurisdiction that has adopted it, with such exceptions as the rule itself may provide.

(2) A rule of statewide application may be established by legislative, judicial, or administrative action, in accord with the constitutional provisions and legal traditions that apply to the subject of the rule in the adopting jurisdiction.

Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution:
Analysis and Recommendations

Thus, a black-letter principle provided that, in marriages of a certain duration, property originally held separately by the respective spouses should upon dissolution of the marriage be recharacterized as marital, but it left to each State the formula for determining the required duration and extent of the recharacterization:

§ 4.12 Recharacterization of Separate Property as Marital Property at the Dissolution of Long-Term Marriage

(1) In marriages that exceed a minimum duration specified in a rule of statewide application, a portion of the separate property that each spouse held at the time of their marriage should be recharacterized at dissolution as marital property.

(a) The percentage of separate property that is recharacterized as marital property under Paragraph (1) should be determined by the duration of the marriage, according to a formula specified in a rule of statewide application.

(b) The formula should specify a marital duration at which the full value of the separate property held by the spouses at the time of their marriage is recharacterized at dissolution as marital property.

Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution:
Analysis and Recommendations

The Comments and Illustrations examined and analyzed the consequences of selecting various possible alternatives.

“Principles” may afford fuller opportunity to promote uniformity across state lines than the Restatement or statutory approaches taken alone. For example, the Institute’s Complex Litigation: Statutory Recommendations and Analysis combines broad black-letter principles with the text of a proposed federal statute that would implement those principles.