A restatement of the law is a guide to legal rules, principles, and premises written by legal professionals. It collects information on judge-made laws and provides interpretation, but cannot be cited as law. It is useful for finding legal obligations and case citations.
A restatement of the law is a collection of legal rules, principles, and premises written by law professors, judges, and other legal professionals. A reformulation of the law aims to provide a complete picture of the rules that guide a given area of the legal system. The reformulations are not laws themselves, but are simply guides to existing laws.
Within common law systems, such as the US and the UK, laws come from a variety of sources. Laws can be made by legislators, if formal laws or statutes are passed. Laws also come from constitutions. Finally, laws are derived from jurisprudence or common law, which refers to the law made by the judge. If a judge hears a case and decides a matter in a certain way, the decision and principles in that case become a binding legal precedent and in a sense become law.
As such, knowing exactly what the law is on a given matter can be confusing. For example, if a person wanted to understand how the language of a contract should be interpreted, he might need to consult a statute, such as the Uniform Commercial Code. He may also have to consult numerous court cases where judges have ruled on how to interpret words in a contract.
A reformulation of the law collects all this information. Rewordings are most commonly written about legal entities where the common law or judge-created laws apply. There is a reformulation for contract law and for civil law, for example. Rewordings collects all the data on judge rendered law from certain jurisdictions in the matter and collects it all in one place, so that a person can simply look up the reformulation to find out their legal obligations.
Rephrasings generally provide some degree of interpretation, explaining what the black letter law is on a given issue. For example, if the norms of contract law—derived from court and legislative cases—all state that the language of a contract must be interpreted by looking at the clear meaning of the words, the reformulation of the law spells out this legal principle in simple terms. The restatement will then usually provide citation lists to the many cases where judges have passed rulings that have resulted in this literal law.
These reformulations cannot be cited as law. For example, a plaintiff cannot go to a judge and tell the judge to decide the case based on what the Restatement of Contracts says. The plaintiff can, however, use rewording to find out what the law is, and then use rewording the law to find case citations that he can cite in an argument before the court.
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