Walton Hale Hamilton (1881-1958) was one of the intellectual leaders of the Legal Realist movement at Yale. An economist but not a lawyer, Hamilton applied the insights of institutional economics to legal contexts, producing many classic critiques of legal formalism. In works such as “The Ancient Maxim Caveat Emptor,” 40 Yale L. J. 1133 (1931), “Affectation with a Public Interest,” 39 Yale L. J. 1089 (1930), and “The Path of Due Process of Law,” 48 Ethics 269 (1938), he showed how legal concepts that had evolved in specific historical and social contexts could lead to surprising and undesirable outcomes when removed from context and generalized into universal legal principles. Hamilton also undertook industry studies to show how wages and prices were not set by market forces as understood by neoclassical economists but rather depended on social and historical contexts, that resulted in noncompetitive wages and prices.