Skip to main content

Finding and Understanding Materials from the American Law Institute

By
For nearly 100 years, the American Law Institute (ALI) has sought to ameliorate the uncertainty and complexity of modern American law. After its founding in 1923, the American Law Institute initiated its initial Restatement projects for Agency, Conflict of Laws, Contracts, Judgments, Property, Restitution, Security, Torts, and Trusts. These projects were completed in 1944, and work on Restatements Second and Third began in the years 1952 and 1987, respectively. Recent  projects have led to the addition of Restatements for Foreign Relations Law of the United States, The Law Governing Lawyers, Suretyship and Guaranty, and Unfair Competition.

In addition, the Institute publishes its Principles of Laws on a number of topics, which result from “intensive examination and analysis of legal areas thought to need reform.” Some of the areas studied have included Aggregate Litigation, Family Dissolution, Software Contracts, and Transnational Civil Procedure.

The American Law Institute’s members are nominated by their peers and then vetted through a rigorous selection process. The Institute’s membership is capped at 3,000 leading legal experts, including numerous UHLC faculty members.                
   
The Restatements are authored by committees who analyze cases on a topic to derive a clearly and concisely stated rule. They can be thought of as a codification of common law principles that have While some courts may later adopt a Restatement rule as the law of its jurisdiction, it is otherwise a secondary source.

There are numerous resources for finding ALI materials in the library, including our print collection, and through LexisNexis, Westlaw. HeinOnline’s American Law Institute Library has the most extensive collection available to library users online, with current Restatements and Principles, along with current pocket parts and complete text and drafts of the Uniform Commercial Code.

Note that Restatements and Principles are not revised until a new edition is complete. Later volumes of a Restatement are labeled as Appendixes (supplemented by pocket parts), and contain citations to case law citing Restatement provisions. Restatements and Principles, including their notes and illustrations, are a wonderful tool for understanding common law rules on a variety of topics.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Amazing, but True, Deportation Story of Carlos Marcello

By
Earlier this week, the University of Houston Law Center was fortunate to have as its guest Professor Daniel Kanstroom of Boston College of Law. An expert in immigration law, he is the Director of the International Human Rights Program, and he both founded and directs the Boston College Immigration and Asylum Clinic. Speaking as the guest of the Houston Journal of International Law’s annual Fall Lecture Series, Professor Kanstroom discussed issues raised in his new book, Aftermath: Deportation Law and the New American Diaspora . Professor Michael Olivas introduced Professor Kanstroom to the audience, and mentioned the fascinating tale of Carlos Marcello, which Professor Kanstroom wrote about in his chapter “The Long, Complex, and Futile Deportation Saga of Carlos Marcello,” in Immigration Stories , a collection of narratives about leading immigration law cases. My interest piqued, I read and was amazed by Kanstroom’s description of one of the most interesting figures in American le...
1 comment
Read more

Texas Subsequent History Table Ceases Publication

By
This week, Thomson Reuters notified subscribers that publication of the Texas Subsequent History Table will be discontinued and no further updates will be produced, due to “insufficient market interest.” Practitioners have been extracting writ (and since 1997, petition) history from the tables since their initial publication in 1917 as The Complete Texas Writs of Error Table . The tables, later published by West, have been used for nearly a century to determine how the Texas Supreme Court or Court of Criminal Appeals disposed of an appeal from an intermediate appellate court. The purpose of adding this notation to citations is to indicate the effect of the Texas Supreme Court’s action on the weight of authority of the Court of Appeals’ opinion.  For example, practitioners may prefer to use as authority a case that the Texas Supreme Court has determined is correct both in result and legal principles applied (petition refused), rather than one that simply presents no error that requ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Lessons for Today from the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda

By Anonymous
“Man’s inhumanity to man is not only perpetrated by the vitriolic actions of those who are bad. It is also perpetrated by the vitiating inaction of those who are good.” –Martin Luther King Jr.   Last week, I had the pleasure of attending  Professor Zachary D. Kaufman ’s presentation on  Lessons for Today from the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda  hosted by the  Johannesburg Holocaust & Geno cide Ce ntre . Among the many takeaways highlighted by Professor Kaufman and drawn from  Lessons from Rwanda: Post-Genocide Law and Policy   were ten simple yet profound lessons:   Lesson #1: Hate speech is dangerous.   To illustrate the role that hate speech played in the Rwandan genocide, Professor Kaufman discussed multiple forms of  propaganda , such as Kangura, Radio Rwanda, and RTLM “hate radio.”   He concludes that we must have limits, including with respect to social media, and further asserts that social media must do a better jo...
Post a Comment
Read more