The Death of Contract

by Grant Gilmore

The Death of Contract is a masterful commentary on the common law, especially the law of promissory obligation known as contracts. In this slim and lively book, the late Yale law professor Grant Gilmore examines the birth, development, death, and even the resurrection of a body of American law. It is both a modern-day reply to and a funeral oration for an American legal classic—Oliver Wendell Holmes’s The Common Law.

This new edition, with an instructive and timely foreword by Ronald K. L. Collins, challenges anyone interested in the life of the law to think about where it has come from and where it is tending. As such, The Death of Contract still retains its vitality in the brave new world of the law known as contracts. A new bibliography of early reviews and new responses reveals how considerable the interest was, and continues to be, in this modern anti-classic.

Genres: Law, Nonfiction

214 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 1995

Reviews

[Christopher VanHimbergen · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first real book I’ve read in months, and it’s not even for fun #LawSchool

[Julian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unsurprisingly this book was so boring. It is a great example of how law school dehumanizes and isolates the experience of real people. Is there any way of learning contracts without talking about steel companies, rubber companies, or gravel companies?

[Drew- Pickleball Librarian · Rating 5 out of 5]

A revolutionary theory for its time that still applies today. Contracts can be views in the same concept as torts. Duty of care and reasonableness can replace strict concepts such as offer and acceptance.

[Michael Harden · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read, The Death of Contract in law school. Lots of food for thought when thinking about what we are told to think or believe and where those myriad propositions and fictions are propounded as rules (are they a priori or a posteriori?) that we are to think, believe, and perhaps practice, come from, whether it relates to the law of contract, the law, or life in general.

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

i read this for law school........🤪🤡

[Caleb · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book for my 1L Contracts II class. Overall, it presented some interesting ideas about the birth of contracts and what Gilmore saw as their demise. However, many aspects of his thesis have been proven wrong in time. Ergo, thought-provoking, but overall not anything that a lay (i.e., non-law) person should read.

[Lewis Zimmerman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A genuinely funny book on contracts. It is a irreverent tour through the history of a fundamental area of the law. Gilmore combined a sharp sense of the absurd with a comprehensive knowledge of contract law to craft these excellent lectures.

[Simone · Rating 2 out of 5]

Only because I’m feeling generous

[B · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of the most cited books in legal history.

I'm not fully sure I get it. He seems to bury two theses. One: The way that the development of the law works is not in a straight-line. It gets rewritten and retconned and so forth. But I don't know who that surprises. And Gilmore does not really know what to do with this.

Second: The Holmes-Williston and Cardozo-Corbin schools have been at war. It seems like Gilmore like the latter a little better, but seems to disagree with both. I'm sure that anyone else who's read this book has discerned Gilmore's clear and forceful stand. But I haven't.

JUST TELL US WHAT YOU WANT, GRANT. WHATEVER IT IS, WE'LL GIVE IT TO YOU. JUST DON'T SHOOT THE READERS.

[Elizabeth Pyjov · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best things that Dr. Barak Richman assigned! I recommend this to everyone.
"The materials which, as lawyers, we deal with are, as we are all too unhappily aware, forever changing—they dissolve and re-combine and metamorphose into their own opposites, all, it seems, without a moment’s notice."

[Paul Klinger]

Linzer recommendation.

[sologdin · Rating 2 out of 5]

great little critique of the casebook style of instruction for law, insofar as early casebook assemblers almost arbitrarily selected 'leading' cases for certain propositions and ran with them.

[Caleb · Rating 2 out of 5]

Much better than the contracts casebook, however there are no photos (sad face).

[SallyStenger]

Read another book of his that is pretty good.

[Zachariah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love me some contract law.