The preeminant contracts scholar and Columbia law professor E. Allan Farnsworth died a week ago today. The Sunday New York Times has a nice obituary here. Another fine obituary here adds additional details. Allan Farnsworth was the reporter for the Restatement (Second) of Contracts and was the author of the most widely adopted contracts casebook, a highly respected treatise on contracts, a monograph on contracts called Changing Your Mind, and most recently, Alleviating Mistakes: Reversal and Forgiveness For Flawed Perceptions.
My first contact with Allan came in 1984 after I reviewed the first edition of his treatise in the Harvard Law Review. My review was entitled “Contract Scholarship and the Reemergence of Normative Legal Philosophy.” My thesis was that developments in jurisprudence away from legal realism made the academic world safer for legal doctrinal scholarship of the sort exemplified by Allan’s wonderful new book (After it appeared, I required my students buy it.)
Although my review was a rave, I admit that the bulk of it was about my main thesis. After it appeared, I received a short note from Allan (which so far I have not managed to locate). After graciously thanking me for the kind review, he added–in words far more wry and pithy than I can reconstruct–something like the following: “I know that the price of doing a book review is putting another’s work ahead of one’s own, but I see that you managed to deal with that problem.”
After that, he was always very generous to me, then a junior contracts professor at Chicago-Kent, both in his writings and in person. I fondly recall us getting together years later for drinks in Florida on Longboat Key, where he maintained a condo. In addition to everything else, he was a rather dashing figure.
Fordham law professor Joe Perillo noted on a listserve for contracts professors that “every generation seems to produce a leader in our field of contract law.” Yet somehow I doubt that we in contracts will see his like again.
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