James Willard Hurst

Who was James Willard Hurst?

James Willard Hurst is widely credited as the founder of the modern field of American legal history. Educated at the Harvard Law School, from which he graduated in 1935, Hurst was a research assistant to Professor Felix Frankfurter, and later a law clerk to Justice Louis D. Brandeis. Hurst spent most of his professional career as a professor of law at the University of Wisconsin Law School in Madison, Wisconsin. He was Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at the University of Cambridge in 1967.

Hurst had his greatest influence through his writings. His first major book, The Growth of American Law: The Law Makers, examined the various institutions and groups that made law in America from independence through the mid-twentieth century—legislatures, the courts, the executive, the bar, and administrative agencies. His most influential work, Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States, was famous for his thesis that Americans used law to release the population's creative energies. The book usually deemed his masterwork is Law and Economic Growth: A Legal History of the Lumber Industry in Wisconsin, 1836-1915.