Addison Mueller, Professor of Law, 1945-56
REFERENCES:
“Addison Mueller, Law: Los Angeles, In Memoriam”.
Laura Kalman, Legal Realism at Yale 1927-1960 (1986).
Addison Mueller (1908-1981) graduated first in his class at the Law School in 1943, and returned as a member of the faculty in 1945, teaching in the contract law area.
In 1951, Mueller published Contracts in Context (1951), an innovative casebook that presented the basic contracts course through a series of fact-intensive scenarios and included materials on business practices and documents. As the title suggests, the book reflected Mueller’s belief that contract law needed to be understood holistically, and could not be fully represented by a set of simple, abstract principles. Like the earlier Legal Realists, he organized the book functionally, around the problems sequentially encountered in a business transaction (building an apartment house). The book became a major influence on how contract law was taught.
Mueller left Yale in 1956, after the University denied tenure to Vern Countryman. He had proposed that the entire Law School faculty resign in protest, but he was the only one to do so. He joined the faculty of UCLA in 1958, where he spent the remainder of his academic career.