Grant Gilmore, Sterling Professor of Law, 1946-65, 1973-78

Grant Gilmore

REFERENCES:

Guido Calabresi, “Grant Gilmore and the Golden Age,” 92 Yale L. J. 1 (1982).

Dennis J. Hutchinson, “Remembering Grant Gilmore,” 6 Green Bag 2d 67 (Autumn 2002).

“Memorial for Grant Gilmore,” N.Y. Times, Sept. 29, 1982, at D26.

Ellen A. Peters, “Grant Gilmore and the Illusion of Certainty,” 92 Yale L. J. 8 (1982).

8 Who Was Who in America 154 (1985).

Grant Gilmore (1910-1982) received his A.B. from Yale College in 1931, a Ph.D. in French Literature from Yale in 1936, and his LL.B. from the Law School in 1942. One of the preeminent contract scholars of his generation, Gilmore, who worked out of the Legal Realist tradition, was to remain at Yale—except for a seven-year sojourn at Chicago—until his retirement.

Early in his career, Gilmore was hired by Karl Llewellyn (then at Columbia) to assist in the drafting of Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code. Much of Gilmore’s early writings were dedicated to explaining and analyzing the resulting product. In 1965, Gilmore published his two-volume Security Interests in Personal Property, which won the Ames prize in 1966 (awarded by the Harvard Law School faculty for the most distinguished work of legal scholarship over a five-year period) and the Coif Award in 1967 (awarded, then triennially, by the American Association of Law Schools for the best book of legal scholarship). Gilmore’s best-known work, however, was The Death of Contract (1974), in which he presented a concise history of Anglo-American contract law, and contended that contract law was being swallowed up by tort as a “reliance” theory of contract gradually supplanted the “bargain” theory.

A central theme in his work throughout his career, equally present in an important early paper on good faith purchases, as in his book published over twenty years later, The Ages of American Law (1977), was the illusion of certainty, or as he put it, “[t]he only legal certainty is the certainty of legal change.” “The Commercial Doctrine of Good Faith Purchase,” 63 Yale L. J. 1057, 1121 (1954). Indeed, paralleling that theme, his own views changed dramatically over time, shifting away from his earlier advocacy of codification, in “Formalism and the Law of Negotiable Instruments,” 13 Creighton L. Rev. 441, 461 (1979),  and calling his earlier work on the law of good faith purchases largely “mistaken,” in “The Good Faith Purchase Idea and the Uniform Commercial Code: Confessions of a Repentant Draftsman,” 15 Ga. L. Rev. 605, 605 (1981).

Gilmore’s skepticism regarding legal rules and preoccupation with change also were reflected in his view of the essence of the Law School. As described by Dean Guido Calabresi, “Gilmore once said that the Golden Age of the Yale Law School always seemed to lie in its immediate past, in the time of those who had just gone, while another Golden Age could be achieved in its immediate future if only a few things were done, if only a few things worked out. With a gentle sarcasm, born of intense loyalty, he would contrast this state of affairs with that which obtained at other great law schools whose Golden Age seemed always to be present, and whose past achievements in retrospect seemed dull. He liked the Yale Law School that way.”