American Law Institute (ALI)

Background

The American Law Institute is an independent organization that reviews United States common law and publishes restatements to clarify and modernize the law. Its publications are used by state legislatures, the courts, and in the legal education system. ¹

The ALI was founded in 1923 by a group of judges, lawyers, and law professors who were called “The Committee on the Establishment of a Permanent Organization for the Improvement of the Law.” The group believed that the law was “unnecessarily uncertain and complex” and formed the ALI “to promote the clarification and simplification of the law and its better adaptation to social needs.” ²

As of June 2024, ALI had 4,730 members including judges, lawyers, and legal academics. ³

The ALI is governed by its council which consists of elected members. The council meets twice per year to decide on what projects and activities will be done and reviews and approves any results. ⁴

Work Areas and Projects

The American Law Institute publishes Restatements of the Law, Model Codes, and Principles. Restatements are clarifications of current common law and are used primarily by courts. Principles are typically best practices and are addressed to legislatures and administrative agencies. Model Codes contain proposed language and are meant primarily for legislatures to assist in legislative enactment. ^{5 6}

The ALI director recommends projects and team members for each project that are then approved by the council. Each project goes through a series of drafts and reviews that eventually lead to review and approval by the council and then the members at the annual meeting. Once approved the official text is produced and published. ^{7 8}

The ALI partnered with the Uniform Law Commission to develop the Uniform Commercial Code, a set of model laws governing commercial activity across the United States which has been universally adopted. ²

The Model Penal Code was published by the ALI in 1962 as a draft criminal code that was adopted partly or completely by a majority of the states. ²

In January 2024, the ALI released a uniform set of ethical standards for election-administration professionals. In April 2024, the ALI released Principles for Insurrection Act Reform to document standards for presidential deployment of U.S. armed forces in response to domestic threats. One of its newest projects is the Principles of the Law, Civil Liability for Artificial Intelligence. At the 2024 annual meeting, the Restatement of the Law, Children and the Law, was approved. The 2023 to 2024 ALI annual report notes that “while traditionally children were assumed to be dependent, vulnerable and incompetent, today they are rights bearing legal persons for some purposes—but not others.” ³

Controversy

A National Review article in 2018 raised concerns about the American Law Institute’s Restatements, citing the late former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who indicated that the authors “have abandoned the mission of describing the law, and have chosen instead to set forth their aspirations for what the law ought to be.” ⁹

Members

Notable members of the American Law Institute include U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson who was nominated by President Joe Biden; ¹⁰ Raheemah Abdulaleem, general counsel and Special Assistant to the President in the Biden administration; ¹¹ and Janet Napolitano, president of the University of California, Berkeley, who was a two-term Democratic Governor of Arizona and served as the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in the Obama administration. ^{12 13}

Funding

The American Law Institute obtains its funding from its educational programs, membership dues, publication sales, donations, and grants. ⁴

In addition to individual donors, organizations that have donated to the ALI include the Carnegie Corporation of New York; ³ the Munger, Tolles, and Olson Foundation; and donor-advised funds Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust, the American Endowment Foundation, the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program, and the Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund. ¹⁴

Leadership

David F. Levi has been president of the American Law Institute since 2017. He is a professor at the Duke University School of Law. He earned a J.D. from Stanford Law School and started his career as a law clerk. He was a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California, was appointed by former President Ronald Reagan as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of California in 1986, and was appointed a United States District Judge by former President George H.W. Bush in 1990. He has been on several boards and committees including Equal Justice Works, a left-of-center organization that promotes and enables public interest law careers by connecting law students, lawyers, legal service organizations, and activists. ^{15 16 17}

Judge Diane P. Wood became a director of ALI in 2023. She was elected as a member in 1990 and as a council member in 2003. Wood earned her J.D. from the University of Texas and clerked for Judge Irving L. Goldberg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and for Associate Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the U.S. Supreme Court. She practiced law until 1980 and then became a professor at Georgetown University Law School and at Cornell University Law School. During the Clinton administration, she was the Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the United States Department of Justice. Wood was appointed to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in 1995, serving as Chief Judge from 2013 to 2020. She is a senior lecturer in law at the University of Chicago Law School. ¹⁸