Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2023
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197685341.003.0010
Abstract
The central feature of the American Law Institute’s Restatement of Property is that it remains incomplete after nearly seventeen volumes produced over nearly ninety years. The principal explanation for this is the proclivities of the Reporters who have been responsible for the first three iterations of this effort. Some of these proclivities, such as a commitment to meticulous research, have been commendable. But the incompleteness of the effort has reduced the influence of the property Restatement, relative to other Restatements like contracts and torts. The chapter concludes with a description of the Fourth Restatement of Property, now underway, and the organizational structure it has adopted in an effort to produce, at long last, a complete Restatement of Property.
Disciplines
Law | Legal History | Property Law and Real Estate
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Thomas W. Merrill,
The Restatement of Property: The Curse of Incompleteness,
The American Law Institute: A Centennial History, Andrew S. Gold & Robert W. Gordon (Eds.), Oxford University Press
(2023).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/4485