Liebman, Lance --- "The American Law Institute: A Model for the New Europe?" [2008] ELECD 195; in Cafaggi, Fabrizio; Muir Watt, Horatia (eds), "Making European Private Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2008)

Book Title: Making European Private Law

Editor(s): Cafaggi, Fabrizio; Muir Watt, Horatia

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781847201980

Section: Chapter 8

Section Title: The American Law Institute: A Model for the New Europe?

Author(s): Liebman, Lance

Number of pages: 16

Extract:

8. The American Law Institute: a model
for the new Europe?
Lance Liebman
The American Law Institute (ALI) was founded in 1923.1 Scholars have
reached diverse conclusions about the Institute's early history.2 One viewer,
N.E.H. Hull, sees the curtain rising in 1906 with Roscoe Pound's address to
the American Bar Association in St Paul, Minnesota.3 Pound spoke about `the
causes of dissatisfaction with the system of justice'. He described and
analyzed defects in the US justice system, caught an important mood of criti-
cism, and influenced reform undertakings that lasted for half a century. Pound
denounced the American court system as `archaic', its procedures as `behind
the times', and state legislation as `crude'.4
Pound represented a progressive policy-minded reaction to Christopher
Columbus Langdell's 1887 declaration that `law is a science, and . . . all the
available materials of that science are contained in printed books'.5 The propo-
sitions stated in appellate opinions cannot assure a legal system that offers


1 UNIDROIT, headquartered in Rome, was founded three years later with a
similar goal: to pursue coherence in European law.
2 See, for example, William Draper Lewis, How We Did It (1945); N.E.H. Hull,
`Restatement and Reform: A New Perspective on the Origins of the American Law
Institute' Law and History Review, 8, 55 (1990); G. Edward White, `The American Law
Institute and the Triumph of Modernist Jurisprudence' Law and History Review, 15, 1
(1997); Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, Conceptualists vs. ...