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The Common Law
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1881)
A groundbreaking work arguing that law evolves through experience rather than abstract logic, transforming American legal thought.
Significance
Perhaps the most quoted passage in American legal writing. Launched legal realism and transformed how lawyers think about the evolution of law.
Selected Excerpt
The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.
criminalproperty
This text is in the public domain. Original publication: 1881.