The Common Law is a book written by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in 1881,[1] 21 years before Holmes became an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
The book is about common law in the United States, including torts, property, contracts, and crime. It is written as a series of lectures. It has gone out of copyright and is available in full on the web at Project Gutenberg.
A famous aphorism appears on the first page of the book: "The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience." Holmes's pronouncement is a qualification of a dictum by the famous seventeenth-century English jurist Sir Edward Coke: "Reason is the life of the law."[2]
References
- ^ Holmes, O. W. Jr. (1882). The Common Law. London: Macmillan. Retrieved 23 September 2015 – via Internet Archive.
- ^ Coke, E. The first part of the Institutes of the laws of England ; or, A commentary upon Littleton, not the name of the author only, but of the law itself ... p. sect. 138. Retrieved 15 February 2025 – via Hathi Trust.
External links
- The Common Law by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., from the U. of Toronto Typographical Society.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.. The Common Law at Project Gutenberg
- The Common Law by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The Common Law public domain audiobook at LibriVox- Books That Shaped America: The Common Law C-SPAN interview with Jeffrey Rosen, October 16, 2023.
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