The Institute will be undertaking three diverse new projects dealing respectively with International Jurisdiction and Judgments, Criminal Law, and the Income Taxation of Innovative Financial Products. The first of these was authorized by the Council at its meeting in San Francisco on May 16 just prior to the Annual Meeting, while the latter two were approved by the Executive Committee on May 21. All three had been initially recommended by the Institute’s Program Committee.

The aim of the Jurisdiction project will be to draft proposed federal legislation that would impose uniform standards for recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments throughout the United States. It is expected that this will take the form of legislation implementing the General Convention on International Jurisdiction and the Effects of Foreign Judgments in Civil and Commercial Matters presently being drafted by The Hague Conference on Private International Law. The Institute’s Reporters will be Professors Andreas F. Lowenfeld and Linda Silberman of New York University, who, together with Catherine Kessedjian of The Hague Conference and Peter H. Pfund of the State Department, discussed at the Annual Meeting the relationship between the project and the proposed General Convention. Professors Lowenfeld and Silberman will begin their work this year, taking as their starting point the present draft text of the Convention; because the Convention is not scheduled for final action until October of 2000, it is possible that the ALI drafting project may actually influence the ultimate text of the Convention. On the other hand, should the Convention itself fail to win approval, the ALI project should continue to have value as an independent statutory proposal.

The new criminal-law project, the Institute’s first in that field for more than 20 years, will revisit one of the ALI’s most successful and influential undertakings, the Model Penal Code. In particular, it will reconsider the Model Code’s sentencing provisions and attempt to determine whether they need revision in light of the differing approaches to sentencing manifested in the nearly four decades that have passed since the Code was adopted in 1962. The Reporter for the sentencing project will be Professor Gerard E. Lynch of Columbia University.

The newest installment in the Institute’s Federal Income Tax Project will consider the appropriate treatment for tax purposes of the remarkable array of innovative capital-market contracts that have been devised and utilized over the past quarter century but have not yet been successfully absorbed by the income tax. They include not only “derivatives,” which disaggregate and recombine the components of traditional financial instruments, but also completely original allocations of financial flows that suggest that the traditional distinction between assets that are taxed currently and those that are taxed on realization is no longer tenable. The Reporter for this project will be Professor Alvin C. Warren, Jr., of Harvard University, author of a 1993 ALI Reporter’s Study on Integration of the Individual and Corporate Income Taxes.

Although work on all of these projects is just beginning and no meetings have yet been scheduled, members are invited to join the Members Consultative Group for any and all of these projects by contacting Meryl Bonderow at the ALI Executive Office (phone: 215-243-1676; fax: 215-243-1664; e-mail: mbonderow@ali.org). Those who have already joined the Members Consultative Group for International Law that was formed following the discussion of the Hague Convention during the 1998 Annual Meeting will be automatically added to the group now being formed for International Jurisdiction and Judgments.