University of Pennsylvania Finding Aids

In 1934, the American Law Institute (ALI) started publishing volumes entitled The Restatement in the Courts, a supplemental tool that provided references to court decisions that had cited the ALI's Restatements of the Law. The collection, 1937-1976, includes editions of The Restatement in the Courts and undated indices.

The American Law Institute (ALI) was founded in 1923 in response to a perceived uncertainty and complexity in American law. Former Penn Law Dean William Draper Lewis was the Institute's first director, running the organization's operations out of his campus office. The ALI was conceived as a representative gathering of the American Bar (including Judges, Lawyers, and Law Professors) for the stated mission "to promote the clarification and simplification of the law and its better adaptation to social needs, to secure the better administration of justice and to encourage and carry on scholarly and scientific legal work." The Second Restatement of the Law was an update to the American Law Institute's initial project, the First Restatement of the Law. The project secured initial funding through a Mellon grant in 1952 and was completed in 1988. The Second Restatement of the Law attempted to refine the clarification of nine broad subject areas of law: Agency, Conflict of Laws, Contracts, Foreign Relations Law, Judgments, Property, Restitution, Torts, and Trusts. The ALI added two principal areas to the Second Restatement projects: Foreign Relations Law, and Landlord and Tenant Relations. The collection, 1947-1990 and undated, includes drafts, comments, correspondence, meeting minutes, state annotations, and other materials related to the Second Restatement of the Law, which sought to improve upon the codification project first established in the First Restatement of the Law. Nine broad subject areas include: Agency, Conflict of Laws, Contracts, Foreign Relations Law, Judgments, Property, Restitution, Torts, and Trusts. Official Institute drafts make up the bulk of the collection. State annotations constitute the second largest portion, while the remainder of the collection consists of correspondence to and from reporters about the restatements, comments from ALI members and outside experts, and related material.