William Underhill Moore (1879–1949) was an American legal scholar and

Sterling Professor Sterling Professor, the highest academic rank at Yale University, is awarded to a tenured faculty member considered the best in his or her field. It is akin to the rank of university professor at other universities. The appointment, made by the ...

of Law at the

Yale Law School Yale Law School (Yale Law or YLS) is the law school of Yale University, a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. It was established in 1824 and has been ranked as the best law school in the United States by ''U ...

(1929–49), having previously taught at Columbia. His principal teaching fields were commercial bank credit and business organizations, Moore was considered one of the intellectual leaders of the

Legal Realism Legal realism is a naturalistic approach to law. It is the view that jurisprudence should emulate the methods of natural science, i.e., rely on empirical evidence. Hypotheses must be tested against observations of the world. Legal realists be ...

movement at Yale and an early user of social scientific methods in legal research. In 1929 he was co-author with Theodore S. Hope Jr. of "An Institutional Approach to the Law of Commercial Banking," as published in the

Yale Law Journal The ''Yale Law Journal'' (YLJ), known also as the ''Yale Law Review'', is a student-run law review affiliated with the Yale Law School. Published continuously since 1891, it is the most widely known of the eight law reviews published by students ...

, 1929, an explanation and predicting of 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." Moore believed that judicial decisions often reflected norms of commercial behavior rather than judicial precedent, and he therefore sought to establish a body of factual empirical data as the basis of legal studies. In a famous 1929 study, ''An Institutional Approach to the Law of Commercial Banking'', Moore and co-author Theodore S. Hope, Jr. attempted to explain banking law judicial decisions that did not appear to derive from existing legal rules (''lex lata''). The authors examined banks' then common use of what were considered to be questionable practices and found that courts upheld a bank's practice when it was in conformance with the practice of other banks in the area, even though it deviated from hypothetical "normal banking practice." In later articles with Gilbert Sussman, Moore undertook an empirical survey of actual banking practices in discounting notes. Moore's empirical emphasis in legal research characterized the body of his work. Moore's detractors deprecated his empirical work as superficial and contended that "the real social scientists at Yale" rejected it and considered that it "really didn't contribute much." In a tribute to Moore, Justice

William O. Douglas William Orville Douglas (October 16, 1898January 19, 1980) was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, who was known for his strong progressive and civil libertarian views, and is often c ...

, who was his student and research assistant, described Moore's explanation of his body of work and his refutation of his detractors:

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.
William O. Douglas William Orville Douglas (October 16, 1898January 19, 1980) was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, who was known for his strong progressive and civil libertarian views, and is often c ...
, ''Underhill Moore'', 59 Yale L. J. 187 (1950).

References

External links

* Underhill Moore papers (MS 356). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library

Finding aid to William Underhill Moore papers at Columbia University. Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Moore, Underhill 1879 births 1949 deaths American legal scholars Yale Law School faculty Yale Sterling Professors

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External links