Efforts by various organizations to create "uniform" state laws have been only partially successful. The two leading organizations are the American Law Institute (ALI) and the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL). The most successful and influential uniform laws are the Uniform Commercial Code (a joint ALI-NCCUSL project) and the Model Penal Code (from ALI).
Apart from model codes, the American Law Institute has also created Restatements of the Law which are widely used by lawyers and judges to simplify the task of summarizing the current status of the common law. Instead of listing long, tedious citations of old cases (in order to invoke the long-established principles contained in those cases), they can simply cite a Restatement section to refer to a particular common law principle.
Local law
Law affects every aspect of American life, including parking lots. Note the citations to statutes on the sign.
States have delegated lawmaking powers to thousands of agencies,townships, counties, cities, and special districts. And all the state constitutions, statutes and regulations are subject to judicial interpretation like their federal counterparts.
Thus, at any given time, the average American citizen is subject to the rules and regulations of several dozen different agencies at the federal, state, and local levels, depending upon one's current location and behavior.
Odd exceptions
As noted above, much of Louisiana lawis derived from the Napoleonic Code; the adherence to French legal traditions stems from its time as a French colony.Puerto Rico is also a civil law jurisdiction of the United States. However, the criminal law of both jurisdictions has been necessarily modified by common law influences and the supremacy of the federal Constitution.
Many states in the southwest that were originally Mexican territory have inherited several unique features from the civil law that governed when they were part of Mexico. These states include Arizona,California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Texas. For example, these states all have a community propertysystem for the property of married persons (Idaho, Washington, and Wisconsin have also adopted community property systems, but they did not inherit them from a previous civil law system that governed the state). Another example of civil law influence in these states can be seen in the California Civil Code, where the law of contracts is treated as part of the law of obligations (though the rules actually codified are clearly derived from the common law).
Many of the western states, including California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming use a system of allocating water rights known as the prior appropriation doctrine, which is derived from Spanish civil law. It should be noted that each state has modified the doctrine to suit its own internal conditions and needs.
Innovations
Several legal innovations first arose in the United States, and some of those innovations have been adopted by other countries.
The most broadly influential innovation of 20th century American law was the rule of strict liability fordefective products, which originated with judicial glosses on the law of warranty. In 1963, Roger J. Traynor of the Supreme Court of California threw away legal fictions based on warranties and imposed strict liability for defective products as a matter of public policy in the landmark case of Greenman v. Yuba Power Products.[4]. The American Law Institute subsequently adopted the Greenman rule in Section 402A of the Restatement (Second) of Torts, which was published in 1965 and was very influential throughout the United States.[5] Outside the U.S., the rule was adopted by the European Economic Community in the Product Liability Directive of July 1985,[6] and by Japan in June 1994.[7]
By the 1990s, the avalanche of American cases resulting from Greenman and Section 402A had become so complicated that another restatement was needed, which occurred with the 1997 publication of the Restatement (Third) of Torts: Product Liability.
