Lawyers: Teacher In Out of the Cold

• Share

Security Interests in Personal Property is a 1,500-page, two-volume work that took seven years to prepare. It sounds like one of those books that, once you put it down, is hard to pick up. Even its author calls it "forbiddingly technical, a practitioner's manual." But lawyers regard it as far more. "We haven't had any treatises like this for some years," says University of Chicago Law School Dean Phil Neal. "The closest analogies would be the great treatises of Wigmore on evidence and Williston on sales and contracts." Soon after publication in 1965, Security Interests earned Harvard's rarely given Ames Prize. Now it has won the $2,000 Coif Book Award, given every third year by the Association of American Law Schools.

Few men shun the spotlight or deserve it more than Author Grant Gilmore, 57. In a profession uncommonly full of intelligent men, the University of Chicago law professor draws an embarrassment of praise from normally reserved colleagues. His sweeping scholarship allows him to "accomplish the impossible," says New York University's Lawrence King, while Stefan Riesenfeld of the University of California praises his writing style, which "makes study a pleasure instead of a chore." One of Gilmore's students calls him "the most popular classroom professor at the law school"; another thinks that he has "the most brilliant mind." Friend and Fellow Faculty Member Philip Kurland concludes expansively: "In any generation, there are three or four teachers who are the law teachers of their time, and in this generation one of those is Grant Gilmore."

Abstract & Concrete. Gilmore be gan his law career late. He went to Boston Latin and to Yale (where he was a junior Phi Beta Kappa), got a doctorate in Romance languages after writing a dissertation on the 19th century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé that is still quoted by scholars. He became a teacher almost inevitably. "If one takes Romance languages, one teaches," he says. But after four years, "I couldn't stand it any longer." At 29, he went into law "because it seemed an available thing. Soon, however, I began to find it challenging and fascinating. What I liked so much was the wonderful interplay between the extremely abstract and the extremely concrete."

He practiced law for a couple of years, and after World War II duty, took a teaching job at Yale. He was thrown into commercial and admiralty law because that was what the school happened to need. It has been his field ever since. His book on admiralty law, co-authored with Charles Black, is today a standard text, and he was one of the architects of the massive Uniform Commercial Code, which now applies in most states.

Only 25%. After 19 years at Yale and many visiting professorships, Gilmore yielded to the blandishments of Chicago. "We were after him for ten years," says Colleague Kurland. Gilmore sees to it that teaching and writing stay on opposite sides of the law-school coin. "For me, the difference between teaching and writing is the difference between playing music and composing it. I think I'd go to seed in six months without teaching."