Ralph James Mooney

Ralph James Mooney is an American legal scholar. He is the Wallace and Ellen Kaapcke Professor emeritus of Business Law at the University of Oregon School of Law. His specialty is American legal history and contract law.

Early life Mooney as born in Eugene, Oregon. He received his B.A. from Harvard University (1965) and his J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School (Order of the Coif, 1968).

Career He joined the University of Oregon School of Law faculty in 1972, after working with the San Francisco law firm of Howard, Prim, Rice, Nemerovski, Canady & Pollak, specializing in commercial litigation

After moving to an academic career, he gained international attention with his article "The New Conceptualism in Contract Law." The article, according to Carl Bjerre, Hollis Professor of Law at the University of Oregon "forthrightly condemns and carefully documents the broad resurgence of a style of judicial reasoning that, throughout a range of issues in contract law, exalts wooden logic at the expense of factual and interpretive nuances, all with 'profoundly conservative political implications.'"

Mooney is also a leading authority on 19th-century Oregon legal history. His major work in progress is a biography of Matthew Deady, Oregon's first federal district judge, some of which has already been published.

He spent two sabbaticals teaching at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand and the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.