Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Common Law Oliver Wendell Holmes

The book is about common law in the United States, including torts, property, contracts, and crime. It is written as a series of lectures. 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."