Response: The People’s Welfare Redux

Abstract

I am very much indebted to the participants in this AJLH Retrospective for their thoughtful commentaries and reflections. To have such a diverse group of cutting-edge and creative scholars like this one organizing a roundtable around the continued impact of a 20-year-old legal-history monograph is an honor indeed. For much has changed in the intervening two decades concerning the primary fields and questions originally addressed in The People’s Welfare. As Roman Hoyos notes in his “Introduction,” legal history has long since become an extraordinarily “vibrant field” of inquiry in both history as well as law. A recent directory of American law teachers noted that almost twice as many law professors declared a subject matter interest in legal history than in “law and economics,” or “law and literature.”1 Gautham Rao’s excellent survey of current developments in the historiography of federal policymaking testifies to a similar recent explosion of interest in the history of the American state.