Academic

We are in the process of reevaluating our first-year curriculum, and one of the compelling proposals on the table is to include a course on legislation and regulation. Willard Hurst joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1937 and developed with Dean Lloyd Garrison a course called "Law in Society":

We decided we wanted a course which would expose students to a much broader range of legal agencies than just courts. We wanted something that would involve the development of legislation and administrative law particularly.

Last year at the AALS Annual Meeting in San Diego, Jim Brudney acknowledged the debt of modern LegReg courses to Garrison and Hurst's early effort. After Hurst's death, William Eskridge offered the following tribute to their materials:

The most striking thing about the Garrison and Hurst materials was their post-formalist and post-realist exploration of the relationship between law and society. On the one hand, they flatly rejected traditional views of law and society as separate, and did not view society as routinely following the rule of law as it was laid down. The materials were, after all, called ?Law in Society,? and they emphasized how the law's force is limited by social mores and structures and how lay people and private institutions are themselves sources of law. On the other hand, the materials revealed the many ways in which law helps shape social experience, by valorizing one norm over another and by channeling the thoughts and efforts of the citizenry and its groups.

In examining Hurst's work for a recent project, I have been continually amazed at his sophisticated understanding of law, even at the distance of many years. In his later years, Hurst noted that the students did not like "Law in Society" -- which is true -- but since when did that stop us from teaching something?