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Locating Hurst

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

Extract

Three aspects of J. Willard Hurst's locatedness strike me as being noteworthy: his identification as a law teacher, in Wisconsin, in the mid-twentieth century United States of America. It mattered immensely, as Ernst shows in this issue, that his life of mind was significantly formed in the period between the world wars.

Hurst's work is colored by these environments at every turn. Even assuming that he ranks with the likes of Tocqueville, Bryce, or Weber as a “broad-gauged socio-legal thinker of the first order,” it is important to consider him, not as a disembodied, unsituated intellect, but rather as a scholar who lived, worked, and wrote in a context. Though in part “an important extension of and dialogue with several well-established traditions and intellectual frameworks” on both sides of the Atlantic and on both sides of the world's longest undefended border, his work was also the product of a mind embodied.

Type
Commentaries
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2000

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References

1. Novak, William J., “Law, Capitalism, and the Liberal State: The Historical Sociology of James Willard Hurst,” Law and History Review 18 (2000): 99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Ibid., 141.

3. Ernst, Daniel R., “Willard Hurst and the Administrative State: From Williams to Wisconsin,” Law and History Review 18 (2000): 36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Novak, “Law, Capitalism, and the Liberal State,” 111–12.

5. Garth, Bryant G., “James Willard Hurst as Entrepreneur for the Field of Law and Social Science,” Law and History Review 18 (2000): 49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Novak, “Law, Capitalism, and the Liberal State,” 144.

7. Laycock, David H., Populism and Democratic Thought in the Canadian Prairies, 1910 to 1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 52.Google Scholar

8. Bledstein, Burton J., The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 90.Google Scholar Also, to similar effect, see Wiebe, Robert H., The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967)Google Scholar; Perkin, Harold, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (London: Routledge, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brint, Steven G., In an Age of Experts: The Changing Role of Professionals in Politics and Public Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).Google Scholar

9. Cohen, Julius, The Law: Business or Profession? (New York: Banks Law Publishing Co., 1916).Google Scholar

10. Wilkin, Robert N., The Spirit of the Legal Profession (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938).Google Scholar

11. See, for example, Foster, James C., The Ideology of Apolitical Politics: Elite Lawyers' Response to the Legitimation Crisis of American Capitalism, 1870–1920. Distinguished Studies in American Constitutional and Legal History (New York: Garland, 1990).Google Scholar Hurst's familiarity with their positions is apparent from the bibliographic references provided in his The Growth of American Law: The Law Makers (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950).

12. Halliday, Terence C., Beyond Monopoly: Lawyers, State Crises, and Professional Empowerment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 17.Google Scholar

13. Willis, John, A History of Dalhousie Law School (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 31.Google Scholar

14. See W. Wesley Pue, “British Masculinities, Canadian Lawyers: Canadian Legal Education, 1900–1930,” in Misplaced Traditions: The Legal Profession and the British Empire, Symposium Issue, Law in Context 16 (forthcoming 1999) (guest edited by Robert McQueen and W. Wesley Pue), and sources cited therein.

15. Landauer, Carl, “Social Science on a Lawyer's Bookshelf: Willard Hurst's Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” Law and History Review 18 (2000): 74, 91–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. Ernst, “Willard Hurst and the Administrative State,” 19.

17. His preeminent follower has been R. C. B. Risk, whose contributions to Canadian legal scholarship are carefully assessed by G. Blaine Baker, “R. C. B. Risk's Canadian Legal History,” in Essays in the History of Canadian Law, vol. 9, In Honour of R. C. B. Risk, ed. Jim Phillips and G. Blaine Baker (Toronto: Osgoode Society, forthcoming 1999).

18. Garth, “James Willard Hurst as Entrepreneur,” 47.