A tribute to Peter Tillers¹

Peter Tillers was born in Latvia in 1943 and came to USA as a child soon after WWII. Like many for whom the USA has been a refuge, Peter managed to adapt and thrive in the face of difficult circumstances, mainly by dint of intellectual talent and hard work, which led him to Yale, from which he graduated in 1966, and to Harvard Law School, class of 1969, a class that produced three ‘evidencers’, as William Twining (borrowing from Bentham) refers to those in the evidence and inference game: Peter, Roger Park and me. We were blessed by Peter’s friendship and good colleagueship over the years, for in addition to his fierce intellect, Peter was among the kindest and gentlest of souls.

Peter was James Chadbourn’s research assistant at Harvard, and since Chad was the general editor of the Wigmore treatise, doing revisions of various volumes, Peter became immersed in the work, taking to it like a duck to water, since he came to law school with a deep interest in the problem of knowledge. After graduation, Peter did a stint as a litigator, which showed him the problems of knowledge in practice—practical realities which he never forgot and always insisted on taking into account even in the most theoretic settings.

But then he turned towards the academy, which was his natural bent. Peter taught at a string of schools: Puget Sound, Boston College, Rutgers Camden, Colorado and New England, before coming to rest at what was to be his permanent home, Cardozo, in the mid-1980s. In the late 1970s, Chadbourn commissioned Peter to revise Volume I of Wigmore’s great treatise. Volume I is the foundational volume of the whole work, which deals with the fundamental issues of relevance, weight, inference, etc. He researched and marshalled information on those subjects from many disciplines, and rewrote the text to accommodate the new insights, expanding the volume into two separate volumes in the process. They were published in 1982. In many ways, Peter’s revision of Wigmore’s first volume set the tone and the agenda, not only for his own scholarly life, but for those who were touched by his pursuit of that agenda, as he not only wrote about it, when he organized conferences around it for the next 25 years, but also brought together a heady mixture of different voices from different disciplines bearing on the nature of relevance, inference, argument and the law of evidence. His writing has been important, but his facilitation of cross-fertilizing interdisciplinary conversations has been equally important, both through the conferences he organized, and through his role as an editor and a moving force behind this journal.² He was the impresario of evidence and proof over decades, and there has been no other like him.