Renowned legal scholar Peter Tillers, Cardozo faculty member of 27 years and professor emeritus, died on October 3, 2015 of complications from ALS. He was 72 and was living with family in Chapel Hill.
Professor Tillers was a leader in “New Evidence Scholarship.” A prolific scholar he authored many books, revised volume 1 of John Henry Wigmore's multi-volume treatise on the law of evidence, and published a wide variety of articles on evidence, inference and investigation.Professor Tillers was an editor of Law, Probability & Risk and a former chairman and secretary of the Section on Evidence at the Association of American Law Schools. While teaching evidence at Cardozo, he organized major conferences and traveled and lectured in the United Kingdom, Canada, Italy, Germany, China, and elsewhere.
“Peter's scholarship and dedication were widely admired," said Dean Melanie Leslie. "In Cardozo's early years he was influential in establishing the law school's scholarly reputation. The Cardozo community mourns his passing.”
His scholarship focused on evidential inference and fact investigation in legal settings, and the work of philosophers Kant and Hegel which he credited with shaping his approach. Professor Tillers argued that multiple methods of marshaling and analyzing evidence are important in trials, in pretrial investigation, and informal fact discovery, as well as in other disciplines.
"As my teacher and then colleague and friend when we co-taught fact investigation, I appreciated more than anything that Peter was not a spoon-feeder." said Philip Segal '06, who currently works at Charles Griffin Intelligence LLC. "He was a deep thinker and wanted others to wrestle with issues of truth and knowledge as he did. Kindly and modest, he was the very best paper editor I ever had."
Professor Tillers retired from teaching several years ago after being diagnosed with ALS. Among his other honors and achievements, Professor Tillers was the Fellow of Law & Humanities at Harvard University and the Senior Max Rheinstein Fellow at the University of Munich, as well as a visiting professor at Harvard Law. He will become Professor Emeritus at Cardozo Law in 2014.He was a recipient of the AALS John Henry Wigmore Award for Lifetime Achievement in Elucidating the Law of Evidence and the Process of Proof.
“Twenty-five years ago I recommended Peter Tillers to the Dean as an outstanding scholar who would enhance Cardozo Law School's intellectual reputation,” said Hon. Jack B. Weinstein, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York said at the time of Tiller's retirement. “ So impressed was I with his work that I invited him to join as a co-author in the Tenth Edition of a leading casebook on evidence.”
Professor Tillers was living in Chapel Hill, N.C. In a letter to his colleagues at the school at the time of his retirement, he wrote, “Without abandoning rigorous standards, the Cardozo community genuinely welcomed and supported unconventional scholarly approaches. I am extremely grateful for Cardozo's support.”
“With all his many achievements he is very humble and self effacing,” said Cardozo Law Professor Malvina Halberstam. “I was greatly saddened when he told me he was retiring, and even more so when he told me the reason.”
He was among the founders of the New Evidence Scholarship – a movement that shifted the direction of the study of evidence from formal doctrine to interdisciplinary investigations of proof processes that rely on probability theory, logic, and epistemology.
Professors Alex Stein and Michael Risinger are publishing Tiller's last article – his Wigmore award lecture – in the Cardozo Law Review.
He is survived by his daughter, Jesse Glendon Tillers. Condolences may be sent to her at 110 Standish Drive Chapel Hill, NC 27517.