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.