Arthur A. Leff, Southmayd Professor of Law, 1969-81

Arthur A. Leff

REFERENCES:

Bruce Ackerman, “Agon (In Memoriam: Arthur Leff),” 91 Yale L. J. 219 (1981).

Marcia Chambers, “Arthur A. Leff Is Dead at 46; Professor at Yale Law School,” N.Y. Times, Nov. 11, 1981, at A26.

Grant Gilmore, “For Arthur Leff,” 91 Yale L. J. 217 (1981).

Ellen A. Peters, “Arthur Leff as a Scholar of Commercial and Contract Law,” 91 Yale L. J. 230 (1981).

Arthur Alan Leff (1935-81) came to Yale from Washington University Law School and remained on the faculty until his untimely death in 1981. Leff was one of the most popular teachers in the Law School, known for making literary allusions, as well as coining words, such as a “fraudlette.” He was a leading scholar of contracts and commercial law, as well as jurisprudence. A central concern unifying his widely diverse corpus was the problem of legal meaning.

Leff’s classic contracts article, “Unconscionability and the Code–the Emperor’s New Clause,” 115 U. Pa. L. Rev. 485 (1967), critiqued section 2-302 of the new Uniform Commercial Code on unconscionable contracts, as a “study in statutory pathology,” that was a “meaningless mishmash” and formulated a distinction between “procedural” and “substantive” unconscionability. This formulation became the starting point for all subsequent discussions of unconscionability. Leff further developed the view of contract as a bargaining product rather than process, the then current approach, in subsequent articles, such as, “Contract as Thing,” 19 Am. U. L. Rev. 131 (1970), culminating in his 1976 book, Swindling and Selling, a change in perspective which he contended would enable courts to achieve desired outcomes more openly and efficiently by permitting contracts’ regulation as “things” rather than processes. 

Leff’s scholarly style is perhaps best conveyed by Grant Gilmore’s description: “In all his writings, Arthur seemed incapable of saying an ordinary thing about anything. His research was always scrupulous; his vision was personal, idiosyncratic, even eccentric. He defied classification as conservative or liberal, formalist or realist, traditionalist or futurist. He was at all times his own man.”

A fellowship was created in his honor at the Law School in 1983.