Underhill Moore papers

William Underhill Moore was born on May 25, 1879, in New York City. He received three degrees from Columbia University: B. A. (1900), M. A. (1901), and LL.B. (1902). After graduation from law school, Moore worked briefly as an attorney in private practice and taught a course in mining law at Columbia University in 1906. Later in the same year, he obtained an appointment as a professor of law at the University of Kansas. In 1908, he left to join the law faculty at the University of Wisconsin where he taught courses in bankruptcy, insurance, negotiable interests, and property. He spent two years at the University of Chicago before returning to Columbia University in 1916.

At Columbia, Moore continued to teach courses relating to commercial transactions and was particularly well known for his expansive approach to legal instruction. His broad view that legal education should encompass the study of other social sciences (economics, sociology, and psychology), as well as conventional legal analysis, led to a division among faculty members in the late 1920s. As the situation at Columbia deteriorated, Moore sought an environment where he could explore his research interests and continue to teach.

In 1929, he accepted an appointment as Sterling Professor of Law and as a faculty member of the Institute of Human Relations at Yale University. The Institute had been formally established earlier that year as an interdisciplinary center for cooperative research and advocated intellectual collaboration among different academic disciplines. Moore received funding and assistance from the Institute throughout his years at Yale University. Moore remained on the faculty at the Law School and the Institute until his retirement in 1946. He taught intermittently at Ohio State University until his death in 1949.

Moore's most significant legal education publication was Cases on the Laws of Bills and Notes , which he co-authored with Howard L. Smith through three editions between 1910 and 1932. In addition, he wrote a series of highly regarded articles relating to banking practices that appeared in the Yale Law Review in the early 1930s. He collaborated with T. H. Sanders and Henry R. Hatfield to produce two publications for the American Institute of Accountants: Statement of Accounting Principles and Relationship Between Legal and Accounting Concepts of Capital . Moore's work at the Institute of Human Relations focused upon the effect of enforcement of parking laws upon the behavior of drivers in New Haven, Connecticut. The decade-long study culminated in the publication with Charles C. Callahan of Law and Learning Theory: A Study in Legal Control (commonly known as the New Haven parking study) in 1943.

Underhill Moore and his wife, Henelia Wilhelmi, had two children, Alwine Jane and Kent. He died in 1949 in Ohio.