The Common Law
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
The Common Law is the 1881 masterwork of American legal thought by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935), the son of the Breakfast-Table essayist, who served as Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932. The book grew from Holmes’s Lowell Lectures of 1880 and opens with the most famous sentence in American legal writing: the life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience. Holmes traces the development of liability, criminal law, torts, possession, and contract through their history, arguing that law develops by experience and social need rather than by formal logical deduction. The Common Law founded the tradition of legal realism and remains the most influential book ever written by an American on the law. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.
