The American Law Institute Launches Project to Complete Restatement of the Law Fourth, The Foreign Relations Law of the United States
PHILADELPHIA — The American Law Institute’s Council voted today to approve the initiation of a project to complete the remainder of Restatement of the Law Fourth, The Foreign Relations Law of the United States. Sections on Jurisdiction, Treaties, and Sovereign Immunity were published in 2018. The new project will be chaired by John B. Bellinger III of Arnold & Porter and Harold Hongju Koh of Yale Law School. The project’s Reporters are Curtis A. Bradley of University of Chicago Law School; William S. Dodge of University of California, Davis School of Law; 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: Selected Topics in Treaties, Jurisdiction, and Sovereign Immunity 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.
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John Bellinger is the co-chair of Arnold and Porter’s Global Law and Public Policy group. A globally recognized expert on international law, he joined the firm in 2009, after serving as the Senate-confirmed Legal Adviser for the Department of State and Senior Associate Counsel to the President and Legal Adviser to the National Security Council (NSC) at the White House in the George W. Bush Administration.
Mr. Bellinger assists a broad range of US and non-US clients to resolve complex and politically sensitive issues and international legal disputes in the United States and around the world. His clients include corporations, sovereign governments, international organizations, universities, government officials, and private individuals.
Curtis A. Bradley is the Allen M. Singer Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. He served as a Reporter on the Treaties Section of Restatement of the Law Fourth, Foreign Relations Law of the United States.
His research and teaching interests include foreign relations law, international law, constitutional law, and federal court jurisdiction. He has written numerous articles relating to these subjects and is the author or editor of a number of books, including International Law in the US Legal System (3d ed. 2020), and The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Foreign Relations Law (2019). He is also the co-author of two casebooks: Foreign Relations Law: Cases and Materials (7th ed. 2020), and Federal Courts and the Law of Federal-State Relations (10th ed. 2022).
William S. Dodge is the John D. Ayer Chair in Business Law and Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis School of Law. He served as a Reporter on the Jurisdiction Section of Restatement of the Law Fourth, Foreign Relations Law of the United States.
Professor Dodge is a leading expert on international law, international transactions, and international dispute resolution. 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.
Oona A. Hathaway is the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale Law School, Professor of International Law and Area Studies at the Yale University MacMillan Center, Professor of the Yale University Department of Political Science, and Director of the Yale Law School Center for Global Legal Challenges. She has been a member of the Advisory Committee on International Law for the Legal Adviser at the United States Department of State since 2005.
In 2014-15, she took leave to serve as Special Counsel to the General Counsel at the U.S. Department of Defense, where she was awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence. She is the Director of the annual Yale Cyber Leadership Forum and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She has published more than forty law review articles, and The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World (with Scott Shapiro, 2017). She is also Executive Editor of and regular author at Just Security, and she writes often for popular publications such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Foreign Affairs.
Harold Hongku Koh is Sterling Professor of International Law at Yale Law School. He returned to Yale Law School in January 2013 after serving for nearly four years as the 22nd Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State.
Professor Koh is one of the country’s leading experts in public and private international law, national security law, and human rights. He first began teaching at Yale Law School in 1985 and served as its fifteenth Dean from 2004 until 2009. From 2009 to 2013, he took leave as the Martin R. Flug ’55 Professor of International Law to join the State Department as Legal Adviser, service for which he received the Secretary of State's Distinguished Service Award. From 1993 to 2009, he was the Gerard C. & Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale Law School, and from 1998 to 2001, he served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.
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About The American Law Institute
The American Law Institute is the leading independent organization in the United States producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and improve the law. The ALI drafts, discusses, revises, and publishes Restatements of the Law, Model Codes, and Principles of Law that are enormously influential in the courts and legislatures, as well as in legal scholarship and education.
By participating in the Institute’s work, its distinguished members have the opportunity to influence the development of the law in both existing and emerging areas, to work with other eminent lawyers, judges, and academics, to give back to a profession to which they are deeply dedicated, and to contribute to the public good.
For more information about The American Law Institute, visit www.ali.org.
