Today, Hale is best known among contemporary legal academics and philosophers for his groundbreaking writings on coercion and consent in market relations. The bulk of his writing, however, consisted of a critique of natural property rights. Taken together, these writings on coercion and property rights offer one of the most profound and elaborated critiques of libertarianism, far outshining the better-known efforts of Richard Ely and John R. Commons. In his writings on public utility regulation, Hale also made important contributions to a theory of just, market-based distribution, building on the insights of the British New Liberals and other rent theorists.

This first, full-length study of Hale's work should be of interest to legal, economic, and intellectual historians. In addition to clearly explicating Hale's often complex arguments about the legal conditioning of economic society, it situates his work in the larger progressive movement in law and economics of which it was an important,and to date largely neglected, part.