Sunday, March 10, 2019

Professor Robert Summers of Cornell Law School (1933 - 2019)

Robert S. Summers, a contract law professor who taught at Cornell Law School for 42 years, was a preeminent scholar of the Uniform Commercial Code, and advised other countries including Egypt and Rwanda in writing their laws, died at age 85 on December 1.

I took his Contracts class throughout my first year of law school (2004-05). He had a distinctive style of teaching in which he rarely made any direct statements, speaking almost entirely in the form of questions.

I wrote down many of his witty and insightful comments during class, and when he retired in 2010, I did a blog post with some of my favorite moments of Contracts with Summers.

As you can see from that post, at one point he seemed to challenge some of the fundamental premises of legal education based on appellate case law, before saying he was “sowing the seeds of self-destruction.”

It was my first class of law school, and I won’t forget it.

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