Willard Hurst and the Archipelago of American Legal Historiography

Abstract

Leading works published since the 1980s relating to law and the modern administrative state that privilege economy and politics—work by scholars like William Novak tracing the nineteenth-century common law roots of the modern regulatory state, Stephen Skowronek on the construction of a national administrative state, and Martin Sklar on the intersection of reform with the rise of corporate capitalism in reshaping the political economy of the American state—remain intensely engaged with the work of Willard Hurst. Leading works published in the same period relating to law and the modern administrative state that privilege gender—work by scholars like Kathryn Kish Sklar on Florence Kelley and women's political culture, Linda Gordon on the welfare state, and Leslie Reagan on abortion—do not cite Hurst in the footnotes or, for the most part, in their bibliographies. For that matter, those from one subfield do not cite the other and vice versa. There is a simple, innocuous explanation for these silences—we all have too much to read.