https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-framework/blob/7adeb461e0464b0d07c2e8fbe36ce0a22f0a7b5e/spring-web/src/main/java/org/springframework/web/client/RestTemplate.java#L759

https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-framework/blob/7adeb461e0464b0d07c2e8fbe36ce0a22f0a7b5e/spring-web/src/main/java/org/springframework/web/client/RestTemplate.java#L763

Comment From: jhoeller

That's just for convenient calling from several execute variants where the inline call of RequestEntity.getMethod() may return null according to its static signature, even if for the use case at hand it needs to be non-null...