ing. Nearly 300 state police and National Guardsmen trooped into the
town; days later came Cambodia and Kent State and the university
erupted. That summer, as the turmoil continued, two young men, one
black, one white, were shot dead from behind by police officers. Law-
rence, Kansas, dissolved into scenes of firebombs, massed gunfire, and
burning barricades. ³

Probably no author ever fully understands the compulsion to write a
particular piece; not even the baroque channels of academic social study
provided a clear call when I began this project several years ago. I am
aware of the convergence of several themes which have been important
to me for some time, and of a certain surprise at the virtual evaporation
of the compassion which has ennobled our society for much of this
century, in good times and bad. But surely, in the wake of the robust
ghosts of the recent past, my focus on the early history of federal income
taxation must doubly confuse. Doesn't our collective memory of the
possibilities of social change, if it must be stirred up at all, demand
analysis of subjects far closer to the barricades themselves?

From the outset, the era fired me with interest in the values at work
in social upheaval and in the process of political transformation. The
collage of events from King and Johnson to the street battles over race
and war revealed again that our polity--our institutions, their rela-
tionships, and the values that support them--is largely defined by the
structure of wealth and opportunity. It is that structure--made up of
interconnected patterns of wealth and office holding, public and pri-
vate--to which people on both sides of the barricades made appeals. To
gain admittance, or to forbid it, was the mark of power. To transform
that structure, to change the very nature of those patterns, was the
agenda of radicalism which failed.

What subject, moreover, could be closer to the turmoil of that time,
or any other, than the nature of law? Law permeated the Lincoln Me-
morial and Ellis Island, made issues of the policies behind Vietnam and
Cambodia, jolted the streets of Berkeley, California, and Lawrence, Kan-
sas. Law was a tool, a shield, a platitude; it was a nightstick, a principle,
a joke; it was elation and it was grief. For me the crisis made the
structure of wealth and opportunity and the legal environment together
worth study.

While my interest in them grew out of the upheaval of the past, it
was not until long after the violence had receded, when I was in gradu-
ate school, that I began more systematically to consider their potential
links. What might law have to do with establishing, maintaining, and
changing the structure of wealth and opportunity? Some of the links
seemed clear from the first in the mainstream literature, cases of social

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