Hylton on the Economics of the Restatement and the Common Law

Keith Hylton (Boston University) has posted to SSRN The Economics of the Restatement and the Common Law.  The abstract provides:

The common law process appears to have checks and balances that prevent the self-interest of a particular embedded actor (judge or lawyer) from having a substantial distortive effect.  The question that follows is whether the Restatement project is also immune, to the same extent as the common law, from the self-interested incentives of actors involved in its creation.  I argue that the Restatement process is far more vulnerable to distortion from self-interest than is the common law process.

–CJR