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When Hurst began his teaching career, modern legal history was “dead.”<ref>Sugarman, David, “Reassessing Hurst: A Transatlantic Perspective,” <i>Law and History Review</i>, vol. 18, 2000, p. 215.</ref> One of Hurst’s early works, Law and the Conditions of Freedom in Nineteenth-Century United States helped revive it from its slumber. Unlike previous legal historians, Hurst believed that legal history could not be studied in isolation: “a realistic history of law in the United States must relate law to institutions and ideas derived largely from outside the law. Thus we need to study the social history of law, and not merely appraise its history as a self-sufficient institution.”<ref>Hurst, James Willard, <i>Law and Social Order in the United States</i>, Cornell University Press, 1970, p. 270.</ref>. Hurst’s shift in focus revitalized legal history by broadening its scope.
In 1956, Hurst published [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0299013634/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0299013634&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=ccd8f18df3afa709374383f9eb94d6f2 Law and the Condition Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth -Century AmericaUnited States], based on series of lectures given by him at Northwestern University. This book is described by Carl Landauer as a prehistory of America’s New Deal liberalism.<ref>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, vol. 18, 2000, p. 61.</ref> In this work, Hurst explains that the legal and social order of law in the nineteenth century was defined by “working principles.”<ref>James Willard Hurst, <i>Law and Conditions of Freedom</i>, p. 3-5.</ref> According to Hurst, these historical working principles were that:
“The legal order should protect and promote the release of individual creative energy to the greatest extent compatible with the broad sharing of opportunity for such expression” and that “[t]he legal order should mobilize the resources of the community to help shape an environment which would give men more liberty by increasing the practical range of choices open to them and minimizing the limiting forces of circumstances.” <ref>Hurst, p. 5-6.</ref>
Hurst was essentially arguing that American society and the economic marketplace had shaped the law. Hurst did not believe that you could understand how the law worked in society by only examining the great cases of the past or philosophers such as John Locke, instead you had to examine how society’s needs shaped the law.
The <i>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0299097803/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0299097803&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=f5a54017286d465043454eeed2a5aec1 Law Economic Growth: Legal History of the Lumber Industry in Wisconsin 1836-1915]</i>, an exhaustive study the Wisconsin timber industry, attempts to do just that. Hurst argued here that legal history had previously exaggerated the importance of the judicial process and common law doctrine. Instead he sought to show that “great issues of policy” were instead contained in the legislative history and the law of real and personal property.<ref>Hurst, James Willard, <i>Law and Economic Growth</i>, The Harvard University Press, 1964, p. xi-xii.</ref>
Furthermore, Hurst admits that there were not any important legal cases relating to the Wisconsin timber industry, but instead his study showed how the nineteenth century Wisconsin community was quick to use law as practical means to exploit an important and profitable resource.<ref>Hurst, p. 607-608.</ref> Hurst states that the story of Wisconsin’s lumber industry was of a secondary importance to him and that his primary concern was to show how “the interaction of legal and economic institutions yielded a product relevant to broader social theory.” (Hurst, p. xx.) In order to achieve this goal, Hurst analyzed “the interaction of all the relevant legal agencies (every piece of official paper) surrounding the changes in a given public policy over time.”<ref>Novak, William, “Law, Capitalism, and the Liberal State,” <i>Law and History Review</i>, vol. 18, 2000, p. 114.</ref>
