William Novak, University of Michigan Law School, has published Willard Hurst, Technological Change, and the Transformation of American Public Law in the Wisconsin Law Review Online, which he prepared for the Law, Legal Institutions, and Technological Change Conference held at the University of Wisconsin Law School last April. It is something of a companion piece to his and BJ Ard’s foreword to Hurst’s previously unpublished book chapter “Technology and the Law: The Automobile,’ which appeared this year in the Wisconsin Law Review. Writes Professor Novak:
Hurst viewed the law lectures that increasingly came to dominate the second half of his career not as the heart of his scholarly agenda, but as supplemental – hortatory and educational – what he later called distinctly “missionary” work, designed to acquaint a “wider academic public” with the “exciting subject matter” within the field of legal history. And while nineteenth-century “individualism” and “creative energy” and “enlarging markets” did figure influentially in some of those more general public lectures, there is a deeper and different—more hidden—Hurst lurking in the larger body of earlier work that speaks more directly to the dynamic themes of technological change, legal change, and the transformation of modern American institutions.–Dan Ernst
