Wesley Alba Sturges

Who was Wesley Alba Sturges?

Wesley Alba Sturges was a professor of law at the Yale Law School from 1924 to 1961, and served as dean of the law school from 1945 to 1954. He received his LL.B. from Yale in 1923. He retired from Yale in 1961 to become dean of the University of Miami School of Law. He was a prominent figure in Yale’s Legal Realism movement. In his article, Legal Theory and Real Property Mortgages, 37 Yale L. J. 691, he sought to make the Legal Realist point that doctrinal distinctions between “lien theory” and “title theory” did not have any actual effect on how courts ruled in litigation about mortgage disputes. His casebook, Cases and Materials on the Law of Credit Transactions, emphasized the contradictions in judicial decision-making and sought to dispel the view that “what judges said in one case with its setting can be used to [predict] what they will decide in another case” with a different factual setting.

After he stepped down from the deanship, Sturges taught only three courses, annually in rotation, one semester each year—arbitration, real-property credit transactions, and chattel credit transactions. Using an advanced form of the Socratic method, he sought in these courses to teach students rhetoric and advocacy rather than substantive law—what he termed “learning to stand up on your hind legs and make noises like a lawyer.” He was famous at Yale for his technique of calling upon a student to recite what a case held, asking him whether he agreed or disagreed with the court’s ruling, and regardless of how the student replied, slowly forcing him by pointing out difficulties in that position, to adopt the contrary view, whereupon Sturges would by the same technique then argue the student back to conceding the validity of his original position. The point was to teach students both how to make noises like a lawyer and not to get led down the primrose path by an adversary.