The Common Law

'The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.' With this famous sentence, Oliver Wendell Holmes sets out to show that the common law of England and America grew from history, custom and the practical needs of each age rather than from abstract principles. He traces the roots of liability in ancient ideas of vengeance, examines criminal law, torts, possession, contracts and inheritance, and argues that the law judges people by external standards, by what a reasonable man would have done, rather than by their inner intentions.

Holmes (1841–1935), who had been wounded three times in the Civil War, gave the lectures in Boston and published them in 1881; he later served for thirty years on the United States Supreme Court, where his dissents made him a legend. The book remains a classic of legal thought. Its oldest ancestor in Western law is The Institutes of Justinian.