The Common Law
by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
4/5
Dover Publications 432 pages August 1, 1991
Originally delivered as the Lowell Lectures in 1880 and published in 1881, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s The Common Law is the foundational work of American legal realism. Its opening sentence — "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience" — is the most quoted line in American jurisprudence.
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Jim's Review
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Holmes wrote this before he was a judge, before he was a Supreme Court Justice, while he was still a thirty-something Boston lawyer trying to figure out what law actually was. The result is the book that broke American legal thought free of Blackstone and made room for legal realism, sociological jurisprudence, and everything that came after. Dense reading. The chapters on torts, contracts, and possession assume you have the patience for nineteenth-century paragraphs. But every modern American legal thinker — from Cardozo to Posner — is in conversation with this book whether they cite it or not. Four worms. The foundational text.
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