Prof. Capers Elected Member of ALI

The American Law Institute (ALI), the leading independent organization in the United States producing scholarly work to clarify the law, has announced 68 newly elected members, including Brooklyn Law School Professor of Law I. Bennett Capers. Professor Capers returned this year to the faculty at BLS where he teaches criminal law and criminal procedure. From 2003 to 2005, he served as a BLS Adjunct Associate Professor of Law and taught “Law, Literature, and the Construction of Race”. As a practitioner, he worked nearly 10 years as an Assistant US Attorney in the Southern District of New York and practiced with the firms of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton and Willkie Farr & Gallagher.

ALI was established in 1923 to promote the clarification and simplification of US common law. With more than 4,300 lawyers, judges, and law professors, ALI publishes Restatements of the Law on more than twenty legal topics. The aim of the Restatements is to distill the "black letter law" from cases, to indicate a trend in common law, and sometimes to recommend what a rule of law should be. In essence, they restate existing common law into a series of principles or rules. The BLS Library has in its collection more than sixty Restatements in both print and electronic form. This link provides a complete list. ALI also publishes model statutes, and principles of law that are influential in the courts and legislatures, as well as in legal scholarship and education.