W. Underhill Moore, Sterling Professor of Law, 1929-47

W. Underhill Moore

REFERENCES:

William O. Douglas, “Underhill Moore,” 59 Yale L. J. 187 (1950).

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

Norman Silber & Geoffrey Miller, “Toward ‘Neutral Principles’ in the Law: Selections from the Oral History of Herbert Wechsler,” 93 Colum. L. Rev. 854 (1993).

John Henry Schlegel, “American Legal Realism and Empirical Social Science: The Singular Case of Underhill Moore,” 29 Buffalo L. Rev. 195 (1980).

Robert Stevens, Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to 1980s (1983).

2 Who Was Who in America 381 (1963).

William Underhill Moore (1879-1949) came to Yale from Columbia in 1929.  An expert in commercial bank credit and business organizations, Moore was one of the intellectual leaders of the Legal Realist movement at Yale and a pioneer in the use of social scientific methods in legal research.

Like his Yale contemporary Karl Llewellyn, Moore maintained that judges often applied non-legal norms—especially norms of commercial behavior—in deciding cases. Of the Realists, Moore was the most dedicated to the ideal of scientific objectivity. In a famous 1929 study, “An Institutional Approach to the Law of Commercial Banking,” 38 Yale L. J. 703 (1929), Moore (with Theodore S. Hope, Jr.) attempted to explain and predict banking law decisions that did not appear to derive from existing legal rules by determining the extent to which the facts of the case deviated from normal banking practice. The study examined banks’ then common use of what were considered to be questionable debiting practices and found that courts upheld a bank’s practice when it was in conformance with the practice of other banks in the area. In addition, in a series of articles with Gilbert Sussman, Moore undertook an empirical survey of actual banking practices in discounting notes. Integrating his research and teaching, Moore taught commercial law by the “institutional method” that informed his scholarship; students named the course “The Sex Life of a Check.”

Later scholars have criticized Moore’s empirical studies for their primitive methodology, but his core notion about the importance of empiricism in legal research has largely become conventional wisdom. In a tribute to Moore, Justice Douglas, who was his student and research assistant, recounted Moore’s own insight into his research project: “The so-called legal lights ridicule my project. They do not understand it and it would be futile to try to make them understand. I am not writing for them. I am writing for the small select group who are groping for ways of applying the scientific method to the social sciences. Perhaps the present effort will fail. But some day it may succeed. A hundred or five hundred years from now a kindred soul may find in my crude researches some clue to the solution. He is the audience for whom I write.”