Teacher In Out of the Cold

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 Stephane Mallarme 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."

Says Kurland: "There is a revelation of problems an ordinary student doesn't know exist. Grant is a master of the Socratic method, superb in dialogue." He characteristically makes a point by bashing down his glasses so hard that they sometimes break. There is some disagreement about his low, deep voice; Kurland says it has the "sort of cadence and vibrancy of a Welsh poet." Students call Gilmore "the Grunt" because of his habit of harrumphing, and talking into his mustache. One wisecracks that "it's been claimed that he only educates 25% of his students; the rest can't hear him."

Nonetheless, his students call him a great teacher.* "He has the ability," says one, "to pick a minute point of law and expand it, contract it, show its variations, its logic, its evolution. It's not the material that makes his courses; it's Gilmore." Another chimes in: "He's not flashy. Essentially, you're getting hard thinking. You won't find what he teaches in any books."

A voracious reader of everything from Shakespeare to detective fiction --which he uses to "turn off"--Gilmore has managed to become a recognized authority on the Byzantine period. His psychiatrist wife--the mother of their two grown children--owns a superb 600-piece collection of Japanese art. For all that peripheral culture, however, he is not much good at small talk; when he entertains, he especially likes to have students over in an effort to get closer to what they are thinking.

As Gilmore noted in accepting the Coif Award, "the distinguishing mark of our profession is its essential loneliness. We are like spies in an alien land, cut off from any contact with headquarters, with no way of ever finding out whether the intelligence which we diligently collect and relay is what is required of us or is even relevant." Still, he added, "if you can stand the loneliness, it's a good life. But it is heartwarming, I must confess, once in a while to come in out of the cold."

Having warmed himself, he is getting ready for the cold again. He has just been appointed to succeed the late Mark Howe as the official biographer of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes--an enterprise that at the very least should win him a deservedly larger audience than Security Interests ever could.

* Perhaps aware of that reputation, Gilmore once wrote an article entitled "Great Teachers Should Be Taken Out and Shot." Its gist: pupils learn or not as they choose; teachers have little to do with it.

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