My senior partner.

• Author: Kronman, Anthony T.
• Position: Friedrich Kessler, Yale Law School professor - Includes 4 testimonials and bibliography

I first met Fritz Kessler in the Spring of 1983, under somewhat unusual circumstances. When Grant Gilmore died the year before, he was at work with Fritz on a third edition of their contracts casebook. Or perhaps I should say that Fritz was at work, for as things turned out, he had nearly finished his half of the job, but Grant's was barely started. Rick Heuser, the head of the law division at Little, Brown, called and asked if I would be interested in taking over Grant's part of the project. Grant Gilmore had been my teacher and adviser and champion and friend. My feelings toward him bordered on awe. The invitation to take his place on the casebook was irresistible. But what did my coeditor think? Fritz and Grant had been close friends, and I felt like an intruder. I had never met Fritz in person. Rick Heuser assured me that he had spoken with Fritz and that Fritz welcomed my participation. Still, I thought that if Fritz and I were going to collaborate (how presumptuous that word seemed!), we ought to meet face-to-face. And so, a month later, I flew to California and spent a few days with Fritz in Berkeley. We talked, in his office and at his home, about contracts and much else besides. With a warmth and generosity that all Fritz's students will recognize as the essence of the man, my learned and distinguished coeditor invited his very junior partner into a friendship that I have cherished ever since.

In those first conversations we spoke, among other things, about Fritz's own education in Germany, about his teachers and the intellectual currents of his youth. I learned that like so many of his contemporaries, Fritz had been powerfully influenced by the work of the great Max Weber. Weber died in 1920, and for those lawyers and social scientists who came of age during the next decade, he was still a tremendous, almost-living presence. Listening to Fritz talk about his student years, and Weber in particular, I began to understand a feature of his contracts casebook that I had long found puzzling.

In its selection of materials and editorial judgments the Kessler-Gilmore casebook joins two very different - indeed, nearly antithetical - traditions. One is the Anglo-American common law tradition, reformulated (and exaggerated) by the legal realists of the 1930's. The common law tradition emphasizes the uniqueness of cases, the limitations of abstraction, the decisive importance of facts in adjudication, and the possibility of reaching sound and...