He was Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at the University of Cambridge in 1967.
His most influential work, Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States (University of Wisconsin Press, 1956), was famous for his thesis that Americans used law to release the population's creative energies.
The book usually deemed his masterwork is Law and Economic Growth: A Legal History of the Lumber Industry in Wisconsin, 1836-1915 (Harvard University Press, 1964; reissued with new introduction, University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).
Hurst's other books include Justice Holmes and Legal History (Macmillan, 1965), Law and Social Process in the United States (University of Michigan Press, 1960), Law and Social Order in the United States (Cornell University Press, 1977), A Legal History of Money in the United States 1774-1970 (University of Nebraska Press, 1973),[3] The Legitimacy of the Business Corporation in the Law of the United States (University of Virginia Press, 1970), Dealing with Statutes (Columbia University Press, 1982), and Law and Markets in United States History: Different Modes of Bargaining Among Interests (University of Wisconsin Press, 1982).
In 1971 he collected a series of influential law-review articles from the 1940s under the title The Law of Treason in the United States (Greenwood Press, 1971).