A User’s Guide to the Restatement of the Law, Liability Insurance

At its 2018 Annual Meeting, The American Law Institute completed nearly a decade's worth of work on the Restatement of the Law, Liability Insurance. The Restatement's approval was deferred for a year from the 2017 Annual Meeting, largely because of opposition from insurance industry interests. The Restatement attracted unusual attention from interests outside the normal ALI process, in a way that can be fairly characterized as political, in the non-pejorative sense that it involves the authoritative allocation of values.Lawyers and judges routinely look to the ALI's Restatements of the Law as reference works for the state of the law and for arguments and analysis about the direction the law should go. Yet the controversy reflected in the complex intellectual and political history of the RLLI is likely to continue following its final adoption, and the issues raised by the controversy about the RLLI frames its use by lawyers and judges in interesting ways. This article takes account of the issues raised in the drafting process to inform the use of the Restatement going forward. The criticisms of particular sections of the RLLI will be discussed as those sections are raised, argued, and applied in litigation. But the criticism suggests that two general points need to be taken into account in using the RLLI: • What is a Restatement?• Whose Restatement is this?