---
category: "PROMIS Scandal"
created: 2024-04-25
updated: 2026-05-01
tags:
  - Person
  - PROMIS
  - INSLAW
summary: "Nancy Burke Hamilton co-founded INSLAW, Inc. with her husband Bill Hamilton and co-owned the company throughout its PROMIS software litigation against the U.S. Department of Justice."
location: "St. Louis, Missouri, USA"
---
Nancy Burke Hamilton was raised in St. Louis, Missouri. She married [[Bill Hamilton]] in 1963. Together they founded the [[INSLAW|Institute for Law and Social Research]] (ILSR), the non-profit predecessor to [[INSLAW|INSLAW, Inc.]], and were joint owners of INSLAW, Inc. when it was incorporated in Delaware in January 1981. She is listed alongside Bill Hamilton as a co-owner and co-plaintiff throughout INSLAW's decade-long litigation against the [[Department of Justice]] over the theft and misappropriation of the [[PROMIS]] software.[^1]

### Testimony

On March 17, 1987, [[Anthony Pasciuto]], deputy director of the Executive Office for United States Trustees, met privately with the Hamiltons and, by her testimony, told them that his director [[Thomas Stanton]] had pressured the United States Trustee [[William White]] to convert INSLAW's Chapter 11 case into a Chapter 7 liquidation and had tried to detail the New York trustee's attorney [[Harry Jones]] to the case to effect it; the account became the basis of Judge [[George Francis Bason, Jr.|George Bason]]'s finding of June 1987 that the [[Department of Justice]] had tried "unlawfully, intentionally and willfully" to convert the case. She testified with her husband before the [[House Committee on the Judiciary]]'s subcommittee under [[Jack Brooks]] on December 5, 1990, at its hearing on the department's "repeated refusal" to give the committee access to its documents, alongside [[Elliot Richardson]], and was co-author of INSLAW's Analysis and Rebuttal of the Bua Report and its addendum of February 1994. The couple's daughter [[Patricia Hamilton]], INSLAW's sales manager for Canada, swore the February 1991 affidavit that opened the Canadian thread of the affair.[^1][^2]

### Footnotes

[^1]: U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary. *The INSLAW Affair: Investigative Report.* House Report 102-857, 102nd Congress, 2nd Session, September 10, 1992.
[^2]: U.S. Department of Justice, *Report of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua,* March 1993, and *Report on the Review of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua's Report,* September 27, 1994; Hamilton, Patricia C., affidavit, February 1991, Exhibit 1, *INSLAW, Inc. v. United States,* Adv. Proc. No. 86-0069 (Bankr. D.D.C.). See [[Project Abbreviation]].