His principal teaching fields were commercial bank credit and business organizations, Moore was considered one of the intellectual leaders of the Legal Realism movement at Yale and an early user of social scientific methods in legal research.
In a famous 1929 study, An Institutional Approach to the Law of Commercial Banking,[2] 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).
In later articles with Gilbert Sussman, Moore undertook an empirical survey of actual banking practices in discounting notes.
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.
I am writing for the small select group who are groping for ways of applying the scientific method to the social sciences.