The Institute in the Courts: State Courts Look to Restatement Drafts
State courts continue to look not only to the Institute’s established work, but also to drafts of its ongoing projects. In one recent case, the Supreme Court of Nevada quoted drafts of the Restatement of the Law, Children and the Law, in evaluating whether a juvenile who was accused of murder and other serious crimes could be tried as an adult. In another case, an Arizona state appellate court cited a draft of the Restatement of the Law Third, Torts: Remedies, in resolving an easement dispute between neighbors.
In Matter of D.C., 546 P.3d 810 (Nev. 2024), the State of Nevada filed a delinquency petition against a 14-year-old minor with an IQ of 66 who was suspected of robbing three separate victims at gunpoint, killing two and wounding the third. The juvenile court orally pronounced the minor competent and certified him for prosecution as an adult. The Supreme Court of Nevada vacated, holding that the juvenile court incorrectly measured the minor’s competency against juvenile norms rather than against the adult criminal context that he would face if certified to be tried as an adult. Citing Restatement of the Law, Children and the Law § 13.10 (Tentative Draft No. 6, 2024), the court explained that, when considering whether to certify a juvenile for adult criminal proceedings, a juvenile court had to consider whether the certification proceeding was fair to the juvenile, and one aspect of fairness was that the juvenile had to be competent at the certification hearing. The court quoted Comments c and d of Restatement of the Law, Children and the Law § 15.30 (Tentative Draft No. 2, 2019) in reasoning that the rationale for applying competency standards according to juvenile norms “does not apply if the charges are serious, or if potential serious consequences can follow adjudication.”
The court explained that, for a child facing a certification proceeding to be considered competent, the child had to demonstrate an understanding of the right to a jury trial in an adult criminal court and be able to make trial-related decisions, including whether to accept a plea deal. Because the juvenile court did not make any oral or written findings as to whether the minor understood the concept of plea bargains—which have become so central to the administration of the criminal-justice system that plea bargaining “is the criminal justice system”—the court remanded for a new competency determination, supported by appropriate findings.
Smith v. Olsen, 551 P.3d 610 (Ariz. Ct. App. 2024), involved a disagreement between property owners over a shared easement for access to their respective properties. The homeowner in that case sued her neighbor for allegedly blocking her ability to use the easement, as well as other threatening and harassing behavior, including slashing her and her guests’ tires and shooting at her contractor’s rental equipment. After a jury awarded the homeowner damages against the neighbor for, among other things, intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress, the Court of Appeals of Arizona concluded that the awards for those two torts were improperly duplicative, and vacated the award of damages for negligent infliction of emotional distress.
The appellate court pointed out that the homeowner had conceded that the operative facts for both causes of action were exactly the same, and reasoned that the jury’s award violated the precept that a plaintiff could not receive two separate awards of damages to compensate for the same injury. In support of its conclusion, the court quoted Restatement of the Law Third, Torts: Remedies § 3, Comment d (Tentative Draft No. 1, 2022), which provided that a “[p]laintiff can recover once for each harm suffered, no matter how many ways that harm was described or how many legal rules were violated to inflict it.”
