THE COMMON LAW - Rare Book Insider
book (2)

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

THE COMMON LAW

Little, Brown & Co.,, Boston:: 1881
  • $950
(i)-xvi, 422 pp., Holmes classic written 20 years before he was appointed to the Supreme Court, 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."[2] Size: 8vo.
More from Quaker Hill Books