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Home > Journals > Michigan Law Review > MLR > Volume 34 > Issue 4 (1936)

 

Abstract

It will generally be agreed, I believe, that the creation of the American Law Institute in 1923 was one of the most hopeful events in the recent legal history of this country. The plan for the Institute, as formulated in the impressive report which motivated its establishment, was well-conceived, broad-visioned, and based upon a comprehensive analysis of the chief defects in the legal system of the United States. This plan was significant in at least three important respects. In the first place, it defined an ambitious and, in some respects, a unique task for the Institute to accomplish; the report refers to "the work which the organization should undertake as a restatement" and adds that the object of this restatement "should not only be to help make certain much that is now uncertain and to simplify unnecessary complexities, but also to promote those changes which will tend better to adapt the laws to the needs of life." In other words, the proposed object was to undertake an exhaustive study of the law of the United States in order to state that law in ideal terms, which should take account of new social needs and at the same time form a common pattern for judicial decision, to the end that the maladjustments of law to contemporary conditions and the evils of the law's diversities might thereby be alleviated. In the second place, conceiving that the task of the improvement of the technical legal system was incumbent upon the legal profession as a whole, the plan designated a select and nevertheless representative organization through which a conscious, equal, and permanent union of the efforts of the judiciary, the bar, and the law schools might be formed to prosecute the task. In the third place, and this was perhaps the most significant feature of the plan, the necessity of comprehensive, exhaustive study was for the first time in this country adequately recognized as the indispensable basis of systematic legal reform. In sum, the Institute was formed to promote the improvement of the laws of the United States by scientific research. This feature, which has distinguished the Institute from the welter of organizations dedicated to legal reform, was highly significant and hopeful.

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