Professor Shanker.

• Author: Leatherberry, Wilbur C.
• Position: Tribute to Professor Morris Shanker - Testimonial

When I joined the faculty in 1973, all my colleagues called Professor Shanker "Morry." It took a while for me to get used to doing that because I was his student in four commercial law classes. He remained Professor Shanker--the one who talked about "the majority view, the minority view, and the Shanker view." As students, we knew that the Shanker view would be important on the exam. We also came to see that the Shanker view was always well-supported and very often should have been the dominant view with respect to commercial law issues.

Morry began teaching in 1961 as the Uniform Commercial Code ("UCC" or the "Code") was sweeping the country. It was enacted in Ohio in 1962. Morry had several years of commercial law practice experience dealing with the jumble of statutes and case law that the UCC was designed to supplant. In my commercial law classes in 1966--58, we read cases decided under the old law (since there were so few UCC decisions that entered the casebooks in those years) and attempted to apply the new code to those fact patterns. Morry was an enthusiastic and energetic advocate of the change wrought by the UCC. He spoke with admiration about the drafters, especially Karl Llewelyn and Grant Gilmore and gave us an appreciation of what a great achievement the Code was. He also pointed out the many drafting problems and made us think carefully about how courts should construe the ambiguities and fill the gaps in the text.

As one who saw the benefits of the change wrought by Article 2, Morry wrote an article about the parallel development of strict tort products liability. (1) He argued that individuals could be compensated appropriately within the parameters of Article 2 for personal injuries caused by defective products. What the strict tort proponents saw as barriers to effective compensation could have been dealt with by courts applying Article 2 and by a few sensible amendments. What he considered unintended consequences of strict tort--elimination of any possibility of reducing the price of goods in exchange for a limitation of liability, for example--would have been avoided if Article 2 had been permitted to control the product liability field instead of strict tort. (2) He may well have been fight, but the dominant wave was led by Prosser, Traynor, and Wade and strict tort captured the field. Although strict tort did not completely eclipse the field, as Morry had first feared, it created some confusion for practicing lawyers...