Wesley Alba Sturges (1893-1962), an alumnus of the Law School (1923), was one of the most popular teachers on the faculty of his day and served as dean of the Law School from 1945-54. He retired from Yale in 1961 to become dean of the University of Miami Law School.

A prominent figure in Yale’s Legal Realist movement of the 1930s, Sturges wrote on a range of commercial topics, including bankruptcy, arbitration, and credit transactions. In a well-known article, “Legal Theory and Real Property Mortgages,” 37 Yale L. J. 691 (1928), Sturges (with Samuel Clark) demonstrated that doctrinal distinctions between “lien theory” and “title theory” had no impact on how courts ruled in mortgage disputes. His casebook, Cases and Materials on the Law of Credit Transactions (1936), embodied the Realist functional approach to law, organizing cases in the way a practicing lawyer would approach problems and combining what were previously separate courses in bankruptcy, mortgages and suretyship, into one course on the credit system.