The following post comes from Ryan Reynolds, a 3L at Scalia Law and Research Assistant at CPIP.
By Ryan Reynolds
In 2015, the American Law Institute (ALI) made the announcement that it would restate an area of law that is dominated by a detailed statute—the Restatement of Copyright. ALI’s Restatements have played an important role in the development of the law, with judges, lawmakers, and law students referring to them as important tools in understanding different bodies of law. In the nearly one hundred years since ALI’s formation, however, its Restatement projects have historically eschewed legal fields dominated by statutes, instead focusing on common law topics. Therefore, when ALI announced its plan to create a Restatement of Copyright, there were many who were skeptical of the project.
It is in this context that Professors Shyamkrishna Balganesh and Peter Menell provide insight in their forthcoming article in the Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts, Restatements of Statutory Law: The Curious Case of the Restatement of Copyright. While Profs. Balganesh and Menell support a Restatement of Copyright, they argue against ALI’s application of the traditional Restatement format to an area of law dominated by a detailed federal statute. They argue that such an application ignores the analytical mismatch between the traditional Restatement format and statutory domains that will create more confusion than clarity. To resolve this mismatch, Profs. Balganesh and Menell argue for several modest changes that would allow the project to serve as a template for future statutory Restatements.
Historical Origins of the “Mismatch”
Looking to the origins of ALI, Profs. Balganesh and Menell illustrate that, from the beginning, it purposely avoided areas of law principally governed by statutes. ALI’s conception of its core function then, as now, was to resolve the uncertainty and complexity of American law—which, at the time of ALI’s formation, was derived from judge-made law that lacked general agreements on legal principles. Therefore, ALI provided guidance to judges and those involved in the legal field with the first Restatements of the law. These Restatements distilled black-letter rules of law from the disparate court decisions across the country and were seen as clear statements of the law.
It is for this reason that, soon after ALI approved a Restatement of Business Associations, fear arose among its membership that it was a subject too steeped in statutory provisions to fit the Restatement model. To address this fear, then ALI Director William Draper Lewis prepared a report outlining a framework to adapt Restatements to statutorily dominated legal fields. At its core, this framework advocated for placing the statutory provisions of subjects governed by uniform statutory law front and center. To Mr. Lewis, the primary value of these Restatements would not consist in distilling black-letter rules of law but would instead be the clarification of interpretive principles, providing the relevant judicial and executive efforts surrounding the statutory text.
Despite Mr. Lewis’ efforts, however, ALI ultimately abandoned the project and never revisited the framework of Lewis’ report. Following this affair, ALI’s Restatements avoided direct engagement with fields dominated by statutory law, instead using model codes as an alternative. That changed in 2015 when ALI announced the Restatement of Copyright project.
The “Mismatch” in the Current Restatement Initiative
As Advisors on the Restatement of Copyright project, Profs. Balganesh and Menell take time to outline their experience and criticism of the project’s use of the traditional Restatement model to copyright law. Despite ALI initially indicating that the project would focus on common law features of the Copyright Act, the first circulated draft indicated that its scope had expanded to include federal statutory provisions. To create its distilled black-letter rules of law, Profs. Balganesh and Menell note that the draft paraphrased, condensed, and reworded the statutory provisions of the Copyright Act. These changes were such that the “lack of attention to the text, legislative history, and administrative context of copyright law . . . would not aid busy judges in identifying pertinent sources for interpreting statutory provisions.”
To illustrate their criticism of the mismatch, Profs. Balganesh and Menell provide an in-depth case study of ALI’s efforts to restate the Copyright Act’s distribution right. As they explain, the interpretation of the distribution right has been subject to significant interpretive controversy. With the rise of peer-to-peer file sharing in the early 2000s, the distribution right was the subject of massive litigation. While some courts interpreted a violation of the distribution right narrowly to require proof that sound recordings placed in a share folder were actually downloaded by a third party, other courts read it broadly so that merely “making available” a sound recording through a peer-to-peer network could constitute a violation. As argued by Profs. Balganesh and Menell, the legislative history of the Copyright Act demonstrates Congress’ intention for a broad reading of the distribution right. This legislative history was not considered by a court until the Tenth Circuit’s opinion in Diversy v. Schmidly, where the court held that the distribution right included liability for “making available” copyrighted works to the public. This same interpretation was also reached by the Copyright Office in a 2016 report prepared at the request of the House Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property & the Internet.
At its core, Profs. Balganesh and Menell criticize ALI’s draft of the distribution right for not presenting faithfully all the pertinent interpretive sources and instead improperly stepping into the role of a judge by making an interpretive decision itself. Despite it’s claiming not to do so, Profs. Balganesh and Menell argue that the draft intentionally put aside a meaningful discussion of the legislative history to adopt an interpretation of the distribution right that rejected the “making available” approach to liability. Further, in its formulation of its black-letter law, the draft relied solely upon court decisions interpreting the statute prior to the Diversy decision, where the legislative history was not understood, and at no point presented the language of the statute itself. Despite their raising of these concerns to ALI, Profs. Balganesh and Menell state that ALI only “double[d] down,” committing to its textualist interpretation while “purporting not to take a position.”
Proposed Remedies for the “Mismatch”
To remedy the mismatch in the current project, Profs. Balganesh and Menell first propose that the Restatement should modify its perspective. In the traditional model, Restatements purport to speak from the perspective of an “excellent common-law judge.” When it is extended to statutory areas of law, however, Profs. Balganesh and Menell argue that this perspective is inappropriate. As statutory interpretation relies on the discretion of judges, a black-letter rule prescribing a singular interpretation of the statutory language steps beyond the role of a Restatement to only clarify the law. Profs. Balganesh and Menell propose that the Restatement should instead act to aid judges in exercising their discretion by providing them with a forthright explication of the materials that inform statutory interpretation, such as an overview of the relevant legislative history or interpretive approaches by other courts.
Second, Profs. Balganesh and Menell propose an update to the Restatement template. Keeping with the idea from Mr. Lewis’ report, Profs. Balganesh and Menell propose that the traditional black-letter law section of the Restatement be replaced with the actual and complete text of the statutory provisions. They then propose that the Restatement lay out sources of interpretation available to a judge in the context of the statute. Since interpretation begins with the text of the statute, placing the text front and center, then followed by relevant interpretive tools, respects the role of a judge while ultimately aiding in the interpretive exercise. Last, Profs. Balganesh and Menell propose reworking the preamble to the Restatement of Copyright as an objective primer to the history surrounding the Copyright Act’s formation. Due to the complex and unique history surrounding the Act’s evolution, Profs. Balganesh and Menell argue that such a preamble would allow an interpreter from the outset to see some of the relevant tools and sources that could be used in interpreting its provisions.
By Mandi Hart