theHurst five-year plan. He would ask them, ‘What are you working on?’ And they would say something or other, and then he would give them an alternative, ambitious programme, and say, ‘Why don’t you do that instead?’ And he was always right. Anyway, I went to Wisconsin, and I wrote my first book. It was part of a series of books he inspired about Wisconsin legal history. You have to understand that his legal history was revolutionary. Absolutely revolutionary. It was first of all local, and second of all it was about how the law was actually operating. He wrote a lot. One of his biggest books was about the lumber industry in Wisconsin, and how the people in that industry used the law, how the law affected the lumber industry. If at that time you had said, let’s say, to a professor at Harvard, yes, a book about the lumber industry in Wisconsin, they would have thought you were out of your mind. Who cares about the lumber industry in Wisconsin? But it was path-breaking. Hurst also sponsored a book about the dairy industry in Wisconsin. There was more known about Wisconsin legal history in the nineteenth century than about any other state. My first book was Contract Law in America, whichwas about Wisconsin contract law. Not about the doctrine, but about the social background of these cases, how were cases of one period differed from cases of another period, what were the cases about, and what did they tell you about the role of contract law in society, and so on.5 Totally and thoroughly a hundred per cent Hurstian book. part ii • legal cultures • kjell å modéer 4 Per Stjernquist, Laws in the Forest: A Study of Public Direction of Swedish Private Forestry (Lund: Gleerup, 1973). 5 Lawrence M. Friedman, Contract Law in America: A Social and Economic Case Study (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965). 108 Actually, we had a law professor at Lund, Per Stjernquist, who was very much inspired by Willard Hurst.4 He was the first professor of the sociology of law at Lund.
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