New South-New Law begins with a consideration of the origins of crop lien laws, which conservative southern legislators enacted as a means for landowners to obtain credit at a time when they had little in the way of tangible assets. However, the lien laws soon proved to have unanticipated and troublesome consequences, primarily because many of the laws were construed in such a way that several different parties - not only landowners but also tenants and workers - could give a lien on the same crop.

Woodman examines the evolution of lien laws in every southern state and the ways in which the laws created new problems, and then how efforts to solve them produced additional conflicts that the legislatures and the courts sought subsequently to resolve.

The new free labor and credit systems that gradually emerged operated within the boundaries that the formal law established, but only in the course of sharp political struggles reflecting the different economic interests and the changing political power of landowners, merchants, and landless farmers, black and white.

The book also examines the legal development of a free labor system to replace the old master-slave system. This took the form primarily of landowner-tenant and landowner-sharecropper relations. Woodman explains how the laws governing these relations - particularly the laws that distinguished between tenants and croppers and that dictated how and when they were paid for their work - eventually created a repressive labor system that gave landlords almost complete control of their work force.

Indeed, after the departure of the Freedmen's Bureau and the fall of the radical regimes, agricultural laborers saw whatever hard-won rights they had steadily erode.