Professor Dodge Resumes Role as Reporter for ALI Restatement on Foreign Relations Law

The American Law Institute’s Council has approved the initiation of a project to complete the remainder of Restatement of the Law Fourth, The Foreign Relations Law of the United States, for which UC Davis School of Law Professor William S. Dodge will serve as a Reporter. Dodge served from 2012-2018 as a Reporter for the first phase of the Restatement, which covered treaties, jurisdiction and judgments, and state immunity.

John B. Bellinger III of Arnold and Porter and Harold Hongju Koh of Yale Law School will chair the new project. The project’s Reporters are Dodge, Curtis A. Bradley of University of Chicago Law School, and Oona A. Hathaway of Yale Law School.

The new Restatement will cover topics not addressed in the previous volume of the Restatement of the Law, Fourth, The Foreign Relations Law of the United States, as well as select topics that have emerged since publication of the Restatement Third. The Reporters will determine the scope of work for the project, and the Chairs will provide guidance to the Reporters throughout the project.

“ALI is delighted that this talented team of Chairs and Reporters, with its broad and deep knowledge and practical experience in foreign relations law, will lead this important project,” explained ALI Deputy Director Eleanor Barrett. “The Institute, along with the Chairs and Reporters, will now begin to identify Advisers with diverse expertise for the project. We are thrilled to be bringing the Fourth Restatement to completion.”

ALI’s Restatements of the Law are primarily addressed to courts. They aim to provide clear formulations of common law and its statutory elements and reflect the law as it presently stands or might appropriately be stated by a court. Although Restatements aspire toward the precision of statutory language, they also are intended to reflect the flexibility and capacity for development and growth of the common law. That is why they are phrased in the descriptive terms of a judge announcing the law to be applied in a given case rather than in the mandatory terms of a statute.

William S. Dodge is the John D. Ayer Chair in Business Law and Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at the UC Davis School of Law. He is co-author of the casebook Transnational Business Problems (6th ed. Foundation Press 2019), co-author of Transnational Litigation in a Nutshell (2d ed. West 2021), and co-editor of International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court: Continuity and Change (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which won the American Society of International Law’s 2012 certificate of merit.

Read the full ALI press release on the new project.