Grant Gilmore and the Illusion of Certainty
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Certainty*
Ellen A. Peterst
There is, to my mind, no way to put into words the abysmal loss that I
feel, that we all share, now that Grant Gilmore is no longer with us. I
cannot eloquently address that loss, and so I will not try. Instead, let me
recount some happier recollections of better days-of Grant Gilmore as a
teacher and a scholar, a colleague and a friend.
In the fall of 1952, exactly thirty years ago, I was a second year student
at this law school and a member of Grant Gilmore's class in commercial
law. I believe the class met in the room that I still think of as room 114. I
recall having the good fortune to be seated somewhat to the left of center,
so that when Grant swung around in his chair as he addressed the class, I
had a fair chance of catching at least the middle and almost invariably the
end of the questions that were being put to us. Our agenda was the devel-
opment of commercial law, principally under the then still extant Uni-
form Sales Act.' As Grant Gilmore's questions unfolded, each more pene-
trating and less answerable than its immediate predecessor, the class
learned, painfully, to abandon its last vestiges of hope for certainty in the
law. The next year a student borrowed my commercial law notes from
that fall, only to return the notes the following day, in high dudgeon; they
contained nothing but questions, interminable questions. The borrower
was, of course, right; the notes were, however, accurate.
A student's first response to a Gilmore class was excitement, exhilara-
tion at a masterful demonstration of the Socratic method and of legal real-
ism-but that was only the first response. The enduring message was that
abandonment of the illusion of certainty did not signal nihilism, or anar-
chy, or anti-intellectualism. On the contrary, we learned, as Grant wrote
the following year in his celebrated article on good faith purchase, that
[t]he only legal certainty is the certainty of legal change.'
In all his teaching, and in his scholarly work in commercial law, Grant
* Delivered at the Yale Law School memorial service for Grant Gilmore, Oct. 3, 1982.
t Associate Justice, Connecticut Supreme Court; Professor (Adjunct) of Law, Yale University.
1. The Uniform Commercial Code, which superseded the Uniform Sales Act, became effective in
Pennsylvania in 1954; however, in large part because of concerns raised by a New York study com-
mission, other states did not adopt the Code until the 1960's, after the promulgation of further amend-
ments to the official text of the Code. See AMERICAN LAW INST., UNIFORM COMMERCIAL CODE at xv-
xvi (9th ed. 1978) (general comment).
2. Gilmore, The Commercial Doctrine of Good Faith Purchase, 63 YALE L.J. 1057, 1121 (1954).](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/ylr92&div=15&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Grant Gilmore and the Illusion of Certainty
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