Contracts Reporter Allan Farnsworth Is Dead at 76
E. Allan Farnsworth, who was considered the foremost legal authority on contracts in the United States, died of prostate cancer on January 31 at his home in Englewood, New Jersey, at the age of 76. In 1971 he succeeded the late Robert Braucher, Harvard University Law School Professor and Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, as Reporter for the highly influential and still current Restatement Second of Contracts. On the faculty of Columbia University School of Law for more than 50 years, he was at the time of his death the Alfred McCormack Professor at Columbia. Last year the Columbia Law School Association awarded him its Medal for Excellence.
ALI Director Lance Liebman observed after Professor Farnsworth’s death:
Allan Farnsworth was an extraordinary law professor in his generation. His work on Contracts Second was in the magisterial tradition of Scott, Prosser, and Casner. To the end of his life, he was teaching brilliantly, including every important new case in his treatise and casebook, and participating in ongoing ALI work such as Restitution and Software Contracts. When I was dean at Columbia, he rarely came to me. But I remember him charging into my office to say that the number of citations to his treatise, counted by Westlaw, had just exceeded Williston! It is not a trite statement in this case to say that we may not see his like again.
A native of Providence, Rhode Island, where his father was a physics professor at Brown University, Professor Farnsworth received a degree in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1948, a master’s degree in physics from Yale in 1949, and a law degree from Columbia in 1952. In 1954 he joined the faculty of Columbia University School of Law as its youngest member. Professor Farnsworth also taught at the Universities of Paris, Istanbul, and Dakar; in the United States at Chicago, Harvard, Miami, Michigan, and Stetson; and at American law programs in Austria, China, France, Greece, and the Netherlands. He is the author or co-author of numerous articles and books, including Cases and Materials on Commercial Law (1993) and Cases and Materials on Contracts (2001), two of the most widely used casebooks in contracts and commercial law.
Professor Farnsworth was the U.S. representative with the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law in the 1970s and represented the United States at various diplomatic conferences on international agency and international sales. From 1979 to 1998, he was a member of the Governing Council of the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT) in Rome and was a member of its Working Group on Principles of International Commercial Contracts. He also served as a member of the U.S. Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee on Private International Law.
Professor Farnsworth is best known at the Institute as the Reporter for the Restatement Second of Contracts, which was published in 1981. The Restatement was hailed by legal experts, and the widely used three-volume set remains a triumph of The American Law Institute. According to Director Liebman, the project, which Professor Farnsworth worked on for over 10 years, "required a professor who knew everything about contract law and was very balanced and very progressive and very forward-looking." In addition to his service as Reporter, Professor Farnsworth was an Adviser for Restatement Third, Suretyship and Guaranty, and for the discontinued Restatement Second of Restitution. More recently, Professor Farnsworth served as an Adviser for Restatement Third, Restitution and Unjust Enrichment, and Principles of the Law of Software Contracts. He was a member of the Institute since 1960 and served on the Members Consultative Groups of several other Institute projects.
In addition to his wife, Patricia Farnsworth, Professor Farnsworth is survived by three daughters and five grandchildren. His only son died in 1993.
E. Allan Farnsworth, 1928–2005