I am delighted to introduce this Symposium issue. It celebrates the 2021 publication of the first Restatement of the Law, Charitable Nonprofit Organizations. Five prominent scholars of nonprofit law first presented these Essays at the Symposium Conference on the Restatement of the Law, Charitable Nonprofit at UCLA on September 30 and October 1, 2022. The Conference was co-sponsored by the UCLA School of Law Program on Philanthropy and Nonprofits in the Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy, the American Law Institute, and the UCLA Law Review.
The Discourse platform, which publishes “timely, interdisciplinary, and novel” Essays on contemporary issues may at first seem to be an odd fit for the celebration of an area of law that is many centuries old, and which dates to early common law. But the genius of nonprofit law is in its flexibility. It enables people to come together and to act on their private vision of the public good—to provide immediate support to those left behind by public programs, to advocate for justice for people who have been left behind by the mainstream, and to provide a space for exploring new and controversial ideas. The nonprofit sector includes a spectacular diversity of entities and purposes, and the law that governs not only embraces that diversity but encourages it.
