Scholar, teacher, and friend
Professor Stephen Waddams passed away on May 27, 2023.
Prof. Waddams was born in Woking, England in 1942. He moved to Canada in 1959, where he would go on to have a major impact in the field of Canadian contract law. He earned his BA and LLB at the University of Toronto before going to Cambridge for an MA and PhD, followed by the University of Michigan for his LLM and SJD.
After completing his education, Prof. Waddams joined the Faculty at U of T Law, where he had a long, impactful career in legal scholarship and teaching. He was a fellow of Trinity College, an institution to which he belonged as an undergraduate, and a Senior Fellow of Massey College. In 1988, he was made a member of the Royal Society of Canada, and in 2005, he was appointed University Professor, an especially prestigious rank granted only to a fraction of the University of Toronto’s tenured faculty.
The impact of both his scholarship and teaching is hard to overstate. He authored nine books, with a tenth on the way which he was, sadly, unable to finish. Prof. Waddams also wrote leading casebooks and textbooks on contract law. His success was partly due to his intricate knowledge of case law, a topic on which his knowledge remains nearly unrivalled. Prof. Waddams’s approach to the law was deeply rooted in history. Underlying this was a deep conviction that the law needed to change and adapt to the society it purports to govern. As he saw it, the flexibility of the common law was one of its greatest strengths.
Prof. Waddams taught several current faculty members, who continued to learn from him as colleagues. Prof. Peter Benson, a former student, became a contract law theorist himself. It is from Prof. Benson that I borrow the title of this article: his respect and admiration for his former teacher and colleague are a testament to the enduring impact an outstanding teacher can have on a student. Prof. Waddams was also particularly close with (former) Justice Robert Sharpe of the Court of Appeal for Ontario. The two often disagreed, sometimes fundamentally, about legal issues both small and large, but still maintained a strong personal and professional relationship.
Colleen Flood, Dean at Queen’s University Faculty of Law, remembers him fondly. She commented, “Stephen had a superb mind but he also was a lovely and gentle person, with a wonderful, wry sense of humour…he was particularly keen on persuading all his colleagues that morning tea was the high point of civilization.”
Recent students experienced the same combination of intellect and humour. Alessia Woolfe (2L) described her first year contracts class with Prof. Waddams:
I distinctly remember excitedly telling my parents after class how my contracts professor wrote the book on the subject, and how he lectured to the class without glancing at his notes. Though his lectures sometimes went over my head as a 1L student, he was often unexpectedly hilarious, cracking jokes about ridiculous contract cases that I still didn’t understand the significance of at the time.
Another student, Kristina Wolff (2L JD/MBA), has described taking Prof. Waddams’s class as “like what movies say law school is like”: challenging, engaging, and with just enough comic relief. A recent 1L small group recalled his reaction to a malfunctioning clock. The clock would periodically move abnormally quickly, and Prof. Waddams never failed to comment “how quickly time flies” whenever he happened to notice it. At the end of the year, the class gifted him a (functional) clock as a token of their appreciation.
I knew Prof. Waddams only briefly, working for him before he passed, but he left a strong impression on me. He worked mostly alone, diligently and studiously refining his argument before turning to others for comment. Aside from being extremely well-dressed, he was polite and had a distinctly kind manner. Prof. Waddams was in many ways a model of what it means to be a scholar, and that is an inspiration I, and many others I know, will carry on. He will be sorely missed.
