The Common Law (book)

The Common Law is a book that was written by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in 1881, 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.

One of the most famous aphorisms to be drawn from this book occurs on the first page: "The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience." Holmes's pronouncement is a subtle qualification of a dictum by the famous seventeenth-century English jurist Sir Edward Coke: "Reason is the life of the law."

References

External links

• The Common Law by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., from the U. of Toronto Typographical Society.

• The Common Law by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.' 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.