The Common Law

The life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience. With that opening, Holmes organized a whole jurisprudence around the idea that law grows from the lived needs of a society rather than from pure deduction. He was a Civil War veteran who had seen how far reality strays from theory, and he wrote dissents that became, decades later, the settled law of the land. The most quotable Justice in the Court's history, and one of the deepest.

The Civil War veteran who became the most quotable Justice in the history of the Supreme Court. The Common Law opens with the line that organized his whole jurisprudence: the life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience. He believed law grows from the lived needs of a society rather than from pure deduction, and he wrote dissents that became, decades later, the law of the land.