61. The Restatements of the common law

The "restatements" are an attempt to provide a coherent overview of the law in subjects whose sources are mostly a matter of Common Law, ie., case law. Teams of leading scholars have worked under the aegis of the American Law Institute to provide an authoritative condensation of the case law in a specific area. Each text is in the form of a outline of the settled fundamental principles of the law in the field with substantial scholarly analysis and textual annotations. The restatements cover prime areas of private law such as property, trusts, partnerships, and torts, among others. Because of their high quality and the reputations of the authors, the restatements are often cited as a highly persuasive general depiction of the law, even though they are technically not primary sources of law. In some circumstances, local decisions may have rejected the principles outlined in a restatement, so the case law on the issue involved for that particular jurisdiction still needs to be checked in practice.

62. Formbooks

No lawyer can practice without model forms. There are many kinds of commercially published formbooks available to the American practitioner. Some are oriented to narrow fields of law and others are keyed to a states statutes, providing model forms whenever the statute indicates some transaction is necessary. There are also encyclopedias of forms for general private law situations. When using a set of forms intended for national use, it is always necessary to make sure that the model form being used is appropriate for the particular state you are in.

Internet sources for forms abound, mostly as sites from which you can buy model forms and form-creating software. Some of the sites have been developed by companies which have been supplying lawyers with forms for years, such as the Blumberg site in New York. Others, such as the one run by Nolo Press, are aimed at the consumer, enabling the layman to do relatively simple legal tasks without the aid of a lawyer.

63. Treatises

Treatise is the term used in the United States to denote a scholarly recension of the law in a particular area. They usually start out as one volume texts with substantial footnoting to lead you to the primary sources being discussed. The more successful ones expand through successive editions into multivolume sets and virtual encyclopedias of the subject they cover. In contract law for example, there is a three volume version of Farnsworth on Contracts which is an expansion of a single volume first published eight years earlier. However there is also a major multivolume set known as Williston on Contracts which was originally produced in the late 1920's. The Samuel Williston died in 1963, but the set was so influential that the publisher has hired other experts to continue to update it.

The leading US publishers of treatises are Aspen Publishers, Lexis Law Publishing, and West Group. Because of mergers and takeovers, each of these includes a number of different imprints within their product line. Some of the smaller publishers include Juris, Oceana, and Transnational.

On-line identification of relevant secondary material has become much easier with the advent of the web. The catalogs of most law school libraries, such as the Diamond Law Library at Columbia University, are accessible through the web. And book dealers, such as Amazon.Com have made the purchase of current materials quite easy.