Grant Gilmore (1910-1982) received his A.B. from Yale College in 1931, a Ph.D. in French Literature from Yale in 1936, and his LL.B. from the Law School in 1942. One of the preeminent contract scholars of his generation, Gilmore, who worked out of the Legal Realist tradition, was to remain at Yale—except for a seven-year sojourn at Chicago—until his retirement.

Gilmore’s best-known work was The Death of Contract (1974), in which he presented a concise history of Anglo-American contract law, and contended that contract law was being swallowed up by tort as a “reliance” theory of contract gradually supplanted the “bargain” theory.

A central theme in his work throughout his career, equally present in an important early paper on good faith purchases, as in his book published over twenty years later, The Ages of American Law (1977), was the illusion of certainty, or as he put it, “[t]he only legal certainty is the certainty of legal change.” “The Commercial Doctrine of Good Faith Purchase,” 63 Yale L. J. 1057, 1121 (1954). Indeed, paralleling that theme, his own views changed dramatically over time, shifting away from his earlier advocacy of codification, in “Formalism and the Law of Negotiable Instruments,” 13 Creighton L. Rev. 441, 461 (1979), and calling his earlier work on the law of good faith purchases largely “mistaken,” in “The Good Faith Purchase Idea and the Uniform Commercial Code: Confessions of a Repentant Draftsman,” 15 Ga. L. Rev. 605, 605 (1981).