James William Moore, Sterling Professor of Law, 1938-74

James William Moore

REFERENCES:

Interview with Prof. James W. Moore, June 9, 1982, conducted by Prof. Geoffrey C. Hazard.

Laura Kalman, Legal Realism at Yale 1927-1960 (1986).

Wolfgang Saxon, “Obituary: James W. Moore, 89, Legal Scholar and Teacher,” N.Y. Times (Nov. 1, 1994).

James William Moore (1905-1994) received a doctorate from the Law School (1935) and joined the faculty in 1938 after two years at the University of Chicago Law School.  Moore was the leading bankruptcy law scholar of his generation. He edited the authoritative treatise in the field for decades, the multi-volume Collier on Bankruptcy (orig. pub.1898), beginning in 1938 when he assumed the position of the work’s Editor-in-chief at the time of the enactment of the Chandler Act, which was a major rehauling of the bankruptcy laws.

Moore’s other publications in the field include Moore’s Bankruptcy Manual (1939) and the casebook, Debtors’ and Creditors’ Rights: Cases and Materials, written with Vern Countryman, which was first published in 1947 and went through four editions by 1975.  The casebook took a novel approach to the subject, by providing the evolution of both the nonbankruptcy and bankruptcy systems of creditors’ remedies, thereby facilitating a comparative evaluation of their merits.  In addition to his scholarly work on bankruptcy, Moore served as counsel for the bankruptcy trustee of the New Haven Railroad from its entry into reorganization in 1961 through its exit in 1980.

Moore authored the leading treatise not only on bankruptcy law, but also on civil procedure, an unusual accomplishment.  Along with Dean Charles E. Clark, Moore was one of the lead drafters of the new “trans-substantive” Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in the 1930s.  He began his work on the rules, for which Dean Clark was the reporter, while a graduate student at Yale.  When he returned to the faculty, the rules had been promulgated and, paralleling his assumption of the Collier’s treatise, Moore wrote extensive commentaries on the new rules, culminating in the definitive guide to the rules, the 34-volume Moore’s Federal Practice, which he personally updated well into the 1980s.

Professor Moore was interviewed in 1982, in a series of recorded interviews of faculty undertaken by the Law School.