The American Law Institute recently announced that it will be pursuing four new “Restatements” of the law next year — the Restatements being an academic attempt to rationalize a particular area of common law doctrine. They’re partly descriptive, partly normative, restating their area of law in the same way a speaker might rephrase a confusing question from the audience.

In any event, given my other hat as a conflict-of-laws nerd, I was particularly interested to see that one of the new Restatements will be a Third Restatement of Conflicts. The First Restatement of Conflicts by Joseph Beale was famously formalist and territorial. The Second Restatement was the opposite, famously criticized by Doug Laycock for “trying to be all things to all people” and therefore producing “mush.” I’ll be very interested to see what direction the Third Restatement takes.

Read more at The Volokh Conspiracy