October 2020 Council Meeting Updates
At its meetings on October 13 and October 22-23, 2020, the Council reviewed and discussed Council Drafts of seven projects and approved drafts and portions of drafts.
Restatements: Views of a Founding Father
On June 30, 1923, William Draper Lewis addressed a gathering of the Maryland State Bar Association at Atlantic City, New Jersey. His speech was entitled, “The Work of The American Law Institute.”
ALI’s Contributions in a Time of Crisis
This year has been an extraordinarily difficult one. We are ensnarled in a pandemic that has caused a staggeringly large number of deaths and deep suffering and has laid bare appalling inequities, particularly ones based on race. The brutal killing of George Floyd on May 25 in Minneapolis has shaken our country to the core.
Coping With COVID: How the Courts are Preserving Access to Justice
The American Law Institute has partnered with the Bolch Judicial Institute of Duke Law School to produce the podcast and video series “Coping with COVID.” The first episode in the series is now available on the ALI podcast Reasonably Speaking, or may be watched as a video hosted by the Bolch Institute.
Restatement to the Rescue: 20-Year-Old Treatise May Help Ease Work-at-Home Privilege Problems
In a time of crisis, thoughtful lawyers look for ways to apply pre-existing authority to evolving situations. Since so many lawyers and clients are now communicating with each other from their homes, the COVID-19 pandemic presents such a time with respect to the protection of attorney-client privilege.
A Landmark in the Field of U.S. International Arbitration Law
In a recent column published in the New York Law Journal, Hughes Hubbard & Reed partner John Fellas describes the forthcoming Restatement of the Law, The U.S. Law of International Commercial and Investor–State Arbitration, as “a landmark in the field of U.S. international arbitration law that displays all the characteristics of the exemplary Restatement.”
When Legislatures and Agencies Rely on Restatements of the Law
The ALI has been keeping tabs on judicial citations to Restatements of the Law since the early days. At the 1937 Annual Meeting, for instance, Herbert Goodrich reported that as of that time, “there were 459 citations by the Federal Courts, [and] 3023 by the state courts, making a total of 3482 court citations.”
The New Restatement of Liability Insurance Law: Straightening Out Some Mischaracterizations
The Restatements of the Law have played a vital role in the rationalization of American jurisprudence for nearly a century. As Justice Anthony M. Kennedy recently remarked at the ALI annual Meeting, the Restatements and the ALI “did for the American, Anglo-American judicial process and for the law in the 1920s what Blackstone had done 150 years earlier.”
Toward Clearer Guidance on Drafting Principles of the Law
The ALI Style Manual, a somewhat obscure publication that nonetheless plays an important role in our work, provides relatively clear drafting guidance for Restatements and model codes. Drafting guidelines for Principles projects, however, are not as well specified. This gap has led to some confusion and disagreement among project participants and inconsistencies in our drafts. My hope is that this letter’s focus on the issue will lead us to more consistency in our Principles projects.
The Restatements – First, Second, Third …
The American Law Institute was founded in 1923. Since then, the ALI has promulgated Restatements of the Law in several subjects and other influential works such as the Model Penal Code and the Uniform Commercial Code, a joint venture with the Uniform Law Commission.