There are now four series of Restatements, all published by the American Law Institute, an organization of judges, legal academics, and practitioners founded in 1923.
The judge can then consider the Restatement section and make an informed decision as to how to apply it in the case at hand.
[citation needed] On subjects where the law is not settled or states differ too widely, the ALI has not been able to produce a Restatement.
[citation needed] In December 1923, Benjamin N. Cardozo explained the prospective importance of the Restatements in a lecture at Yale Law School: When, finally, it goes out under the name and with the sanction of the Institute, after all this testing and retesting, it will be something less than a code and something more than a treatise.
Some of the most renowned legal scholars in the United States, including Judge Richard Posner and law professor Lawrence M. Friedman, have heavily criticized the Restatements, characterizing them as badly flawed.
For example, the volumes generally included a set of Reporter's Notes that detailed the reasons on which the principles and rules stated were based and the authorities that supported them.
The Restatement, Third, now includes volumes on Agency, the Law Governing Lawyers, Property (Mortgages, Servitudes, Wills and Other Donative Transfers), Restitution and Unjust Enrichment, Suretyship and Guaranty, Torts (Products Liability, Apportionment of Liability, Economic Harm, and Physical and Emotional Harm), Trusts, and Unfair Competition.
A volume on the Foreign Relations Law of the United States, released in 2018, was the first in the Restatement, Fourth, series to be completed; however, rather than being a complete update to the previous volume from the third series on the same subject, it is instead limited to selected topics in treaties, jurisdiction, and sovereign immunity.