The most prominent type of rules employed in American legal reasoning consists of rules established in binding legal precedents. The next most prominent type consists of authoritative although not legally binding rules. An authoritative although not legally binding rule is one that courts treat as a rule not because after due consideration they regard it as a good rule but because it was adopted in a source to which the courts give deference. In the common law there are several sources of authoritative although not legally binding rules. One source consists of decisions by the Supreme Courts of other jurisdictions. Another source consists of cases decided by coordinate courts in the same jurisdiction as the deciding court. Perhaps the most important sources of authoritative although not legally binding rules are Restatements and leading treatises.

Had Xerox reported its revenues and earnings consistent with its accounting in earlier years, Xerox would have failed to meet Wall Street earnings-per-share expectations in 11 of 12 quarters in 1997–1999. Securities and Exchange Commission, 2002 While it did not receive the same attention as the cases arising out of the Enron and WorldCom frauds, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) enforcement action against Xerox was significant because it was the first where the agency imposed a significant penalty on a corporate defendant for misleading investors about its financial results. The case was part of a concerted effort beginning in the latter half of the 1990s to address misstatements by public companies to meet market projections of quarterly earnings. Because many of the issues raised in public company securities fraud cases were present in the Xerox case, it provides an ideal introduction to the subject of securities fraud.

Chapter four discusses the Tallinn Manual as a "restatement" of international law. The restatements in the Tallinn Manual were deemed necessary because specific positive law was lacking. Yet, they were also presented as neutral reproductions of rules already in existence. This led me into the recurring topic of this book: the dialectical relation between repetition and something that is absent, unattainable or unspeakable. However, in this chapter, I add another dimension to the analysis of repetition in international law. After all, the restatements occur in a very specific format, the manual. Through a comparison between the Tallinn Manual, consumer manuals and manuals of etiquette, I try to get a better grip on the inherent tensions that come with restatements of international law in the form of a "manual."