Restatement of the Law

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The Restatements of the Law are published by the American Law Institute as scholarly refinements of black letter law. They are considered Secondary authority (compare to Primary authority).

Restating selected subjects of the law was the first undertaking of the Institute after its establishment in 1923. The original Restatement was supported by grants from the Carnegie Corporation.

In the period from 1923 to the end of World War II, the Institute published Restatements of Agency, Conflict of Laws, Contracts, Judgments, Property, Restitution, Security, Torts, and Trusts. Beginning in the 1950s, updated and enlarged versions of most of these works were published as the Restatement of the Law Second.

Restatement of the Law Second was undertaken, in part, to update the original Restatements by revising their formulations in the light of changes and developments in the law. Reflecting change was not, however, the sole purpose of the Restatement Second. Each volume of Restatement Second was also published in a new format that provided more expansive commentary and more meaningful illustrative material, both of which thus afforded fuller statements of the reasons for the positions taken.

Where appropriate, there was included with the text or in the Appendix volumes a set of Reporter's Notes that detailed the reasons upon which the Reporter believed the principles and rules stated were based and the authorities that supported them. Although the Reporter's Notes were not themselves part of the Restatement, since they represented the views of the individual Reporter rather than those of The American Law Institute, the Notes were supplied to the user as the work product of an accepted and well-known authority, thus adding to the value of Restatement Second.

For the convenience of legal researchers, the second series of Restatements also provided cross-references to the key numbers of the West Publishing Company's Digest System and to the A.L.R. annotations of the Lawyers Cooperative Publishing Company. In addition, Appendix volumes for each component of Restatement Second included digest paragraphs of decisions of state appellate courts and federal courts citing the Restatements of that subject.

Restatement of the Law Third was inaugurated with the publication of the 1987 Restatement of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States, which superseded the Restatement published in 1965 as part of Restatement Second. Like Restatement Second, the third series of Restatements contains both revised and updated versions of previous Restatement subjects and Restatements of subjects not previously addressed by The American Law Institute, as well as extensive Reporter's Notes and the other innovations introduced in the second series.

The authoritativeness of the Restatements of the Law is evidenced by their acceptance by courts throughout the United States. As of March 1, 1995, the Restatements had been cited 129,533 times.

- From the American Law Institute website