Many of my clients, after they have read the biographies of myself and the other lawyers in the Locks Law Firm on our website, have asked me to explain to them the meaning of my membership in the American Law Institute. The American Law Institute was founded in 1923 because of the perception at that time that American common law was uncertain and complex. A group of judges, lawyers, and professors recommended that an organization should be formed to improve the law and its administration. The American Law Institute (ALI) was created as a response to that recommendation. The mission statement of the ALI is “to promote the clarification and simplification of the law and its better adaptation to social needs, to secure the better administration of justice, and to encourage and carry on scholarly and scientific legal work.”
Courts around the country have come to trust and rely on the work of the ALI for guidance in resolving questions of law. The work of the ALI is to publish what are called Restatements of the Law, model statutes, and also Principles of the Law which are influential to courts, legislative bodies and also in legal education.
The ALI has addressed areas where there has been uncertainty in the law by generating restatements of legal subjects addressed to courts as well as analyzing legal areas which are believed to be in need of reform.
Membership in the ALI is by election only and is limited to 3,000 members who are lawyers, judges, and law professors of the highest qualifications. The members of this organization have the opportunity to clarify as well as influence development of the law. I was honored to be elected to this prestigious organization in October of 2003 and am very proud to be the only representative of the Locks Law Firm to this organization.
