The Common Law

The Common Law by Oliver Wendell Holmes

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.

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."