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Hurst’s scholarship expanded the bounds of legal history and he lobbied tirelessly to promote his views. Hurst helped found and promote the Law and Society movement.<ref>Garth, Bryant G., “James Willard Hurst as Entrepreneur for the Field of Law and Social Science,” <i>Law and History Review</i>, vol. 18, 2000, p. 39-40.</ref> Hurst sought out funding from private donors to establish Law and Society centers at the University of Wisconsin, University of California-Berkley, University of Denver and Northwestern University.<ref>Garth, p. 40.</ref> Hurst hoped that these centers would play a vital role in shaping the legal education of America’s lawyers. Aside from the University of Wisconsin Law School, ultimately, very few of his ideas were incorporated into the American legal education. The traditional case study still dominates most law schools’ curriculum. Social scientists, and not legal scholars, have played a bigger role in the Law and Society movement. A cursory glance at the Law and Society Review demonstrates that most of its authors are sociologists, political scientists and historians, not legal scholars or attorneys. While the Law and Society movement is no longer dominated by legal historians, legal history was forever changed by Hurst’s work.
It is not surprising that Hurst’s work has been endlessly debated in the legal and historical communities. Both Robert Gordon and William Novak agreed legal historians were indebted to Hurst because “much of the best American legal history since the 1980s has been devoted to issues missing or minimized in Hurst’s vast body of work.” <ref>Gordon, Robert W., “Hurst Recaptured,” <i>Law and History Review</i>, vol. 18, 2000, p. 167.</ref> Any historian who inspires this much scholarship is bound to be controversial and Hurst is no exception. Despite Hurst’s advocacy of law and society, Novak argues that he probably would not be adverse to revisions to his own ideas.<ref>Novak, 144.</ref>ref
Hurst’s work focused almost exclusively on economic activity and policy, and there have been several valid complaints that his work ignored marginalized groups within American society who were excluded from the legal system. Since the 1980s, legal historians have started writing areas completed ignored by Hurst. Scholars have begun writing social histories of law on race, gender, and class relations and they have established new fields in slave law, Native American law, family law and immigration law.<ref>Novak, p. 140.</ref> Hurst essentially excluded all of these groups in his studies. Hurst’s studies instead focused on middle class economic activity and in or around Wisconsin. It is unsurprising that much of the diversity and character of America is left out.
Barbara Welke points out that Hurst’s academic world would have been peopled almost exclusively by men. For most of Hurst’s career, both the faculty and students at law schools were predominately men.<ref>Welke, Barbara, “The Archipelago of American Legal Historiography” <i>Law and History Review</i>, vol. 18, 2000, p. 197.</ref> Additionally, Welke is troubled that most of the discussions about Hurst are still dominated by historians who lack both gender and racial diversity.<ref>Welke, fn. 3, p. 199.</ref> According to Welke, Hurst only studied those Americans who had achieved the freedoms he describes, instead of the majority of Americans who lived various degrees of “unfreedom.”<ref>Welke, p. 201.</ref> Despite Welke’s criticisms, she agrees that Hurst’s work opened up the study of these underrepresented individuals in legal history by being the first to challenge its original boundaries.<ref>Welke, p. 201.</ref>
