Although this work by Kennedy (general jurisprudence, Harvard Law School) was only published as a privately printed edition in 1975, its treatment of the development of American law in the Gilded Age, which adopted methods of European critical theory and structuralism, was nevertheless widely influential and, according to legal historian G. Edward White was the "most widely circulated and cited unpublished manuscript in twentieth-century American legal scholarship since Hart & Sacks' Legal Process materials." For this new edition, Kennedy has added a new introduction discussing the context within which the work was written and considering its relevance to current scholarship. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)