Walton Hale Hamilton (October 30, 1881 – October 27, 1958) was an American law professor who taught at

Yale Law School Yale Law School (Yale Law or YLS) is the law school of Yale University, a 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.S. News & Worl ...

(1928–1948), although he was an economist, not a lawyer. In 1919, Hamilton coined the term " institutional economics".

Life and work

Born in Tennessee, Hamilton received a B.A. degree from the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,07 ...

in 1907 and a Ph.D. degree from the

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

in 1913. He married Lucile Elizabeth Rhodes in 1909; they had three children. After they were divorced he married Irene Till, on July 20, 1937; he adopted her son by a previous marriage and they later had two children. He died in

Washington, D.C. ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...

, on October 27, 1958. Hamilton was a professor of law at the Yale Law School from 1928 to 1948, and was ultimately appointed Southmayd Professor of Law, emeritus. He taught courses in

trade regulation Trade regulation is a field of law, often bracketed with antitrust (as in the phrase “antitrust and trade regulation law”), including government regulation of unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive business acts or practices. A ...

tort A tort is a civil wrong that causes a claimant to suffer loss or harm, resulting in legal liability for the person who commits the tortious act. Tort law can be contrasted with criminal law, which deals with criminal wrongs that are punishable ...

s, and public control of business. Considered a leading figure in 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 b ...

movement at Yale, Hamilton was a vigorous critic of legal formalism and sought to apply the insights of economic studies to the law. He argued that legal concepts evolved in specific historical and social contexts and that, when they were removed from their context and generalized into universal legal principles, they led to socially undesirable, often unexpected results. He developed these arguments in a series of articles in the 1930s, which included: ''Affectation with a Public Interest'' (1930), ''The Ancient Maxim Caveat Emptor'' (1931), and ''The Path of Due Process of Law'' (1938).48 Ethics 269 (1938). Hamilton also undertook a series of industry studies that sought to show that wages and prices were not set by market forces as understood by neoclassical economists but instead depended on social and historical contexts, so that the results were noncompetitive wages and prices.

Publications

Hamilton authored the following works, among others: * Current Economic Problems (1915, 1925) * Institutional Approach to Economic Theory (1919) * Price and Price Policies (1938) * The Pattern of Competition (1940) * Patents and Free Enterprise (1941) * The Politics of Industry (1951) He co-authored: * The Control of Wages (1923) * The Case of Bituminous Coal (1925) * A Way of Order for Bituminous Coal (1928) * The Power to Govern (1937) * Antitrust in Action (1940)

Life and work

Publications

References

Further reading