The Economics of the Restatement and of the Common Law

Abstract

The common law process appears to have checks and balances that prevent the self-interest of a particular embedded actor (judge or lawyer) from having a substantial distortive effect. The question that follows is whether the Restatement project is also immune, to the same extent as the common law, from the self-interested incentives of actors involved in its creation. I argue that the Restatement process is far more vulnerable to distortion from self-interest than is the common law process.