Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr And Legal Logic

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, is considered by many to be the most influential American jurist. The voluminous literature devoted to his writings and legal thought, however, is diverse and inconsistent. In this study, Frederic R. Kellogg follows Holmes's intellectual path from his early writings through his judicial career. He offers a fresh perspective that addresses the views of Holmes's leading critics and explains his relevance to the controversy over judicial activism and restraint. Holmes is shown to be an original legal theorist who reconceived common law as a theory of social inquiry and who applied his insights to constitutional law. From his empirical and naturalist perspective on law, with its roots in American pragmatism, emerged Holmes's distinctive judicial and constitutional restraint. Kellogg distinguishes Holmes from analytical legal positivism and contrasts him with a range of thinkers.

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

"On his retirement from the Supreme Court at the age of 90 in 1932, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was celebrated as few judges have ever been, beloved and revered as a national treasure. Holmes's influence, magnified into legend by the attention he has continued to receive, has helped to constitute the identity of the legal profession, the conception of the judicial function, and the role of the public intellectual in modern American culture." "The present collection of seven essays attempts to view Holmes's work apart from the restricted framework supplied by traditional jurisprudence by reassessing Holmes as an intellectual, a legal theorist, and an iconic public figure and culture hero. Each essay adds something new and distinctive to the scholarly controversies that have surrounded Holmes for over a century." "J. W. Burrow begins the volume by looking at Holmes's relations to various strands of Victorian social thought. she next three essays approach, each from a different angle, the problem of Holmes's relationship to formalism or classical orthodoxy in legal thought. Morton Horwitz provides a sweeping reassessment of the development of Holmes's legal thinking between the early period of the 1870's and 1880's and "The Path of the Law" in 1897. Mathias Reimann presents the first thorough exploration of Holmes's use - misuse, more often - of German philosophy, notably his discrediting, in The Common Law, of the legacy of Kant and Hegel. Stephen Diamond approaches Holmes's jurisprudence and his broader social and personal views by another original pathway, his legal opinions in taxation cases and his private views on taxation." "The final three essays consider Holmes as a man of letters and "representative" man of the American scene, both as he created himself and as he was created by others. Robert Ferguson shows how Holmes deliberately went about the work of fashioning the public persona of a judge. Peter Gibian shows how Holmes's construction of his public style was formed as a deliberate reaction against that of his famous father, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. The final essay by David Hollinger has a dual purpose: to ask what Holmes meant by the "scientific way of looking at the world" and to discover how Holmes came to be such a hero to liberal Jewish intellectuals like Felix Frankfurter and Harold J. Laski."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Brings together distinguished legal scholars to examine a seminal work in American legal theory.

Building on the pragmatic conception of law he introduced in his 1881 book 'The Common Law, ' Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. -- by 1897 a jurist on Massachusetts' highest court and soon to be an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court -- explored the limits and sources of law, as well as "the forces which determine its content and growth." This presentation is seen as laying down the gauntlet to legal scholars and judges in what would be known as the emerging "legal realism" movement. Later legal thinkers like Pound, Llewellyn and Douglas followed his lead, and that lead is seen most clearly in this essay. By the time of this pithy and accessible writing, Holmes had crystallized and clarified that conception of law which he had, in introducing his earlier book, described in the famous statement "the life of the law is not logic: it is experience." Taking that observation to the next level, this essay made it clear that judges make law, not simply finding it in books -- and they must draw on practical effects and ends in declaring legal rules, not simply reasoning from precedent. He does not hedge: it is a "fallacy" to think that "the only force at work in the development of the law is logic." More controversially, this essay makes a powerful distinction between law and morality. Law is more about what judges do, and how people react to that, than some lofty sense of ethics, he suggests. But is his figure of the "bad man" a hero or a cautionary tale? A realistic way to look at law and social control...or a precursor to Hitler and Stalin?

The 19th century saw dramatic changes in the legal education system in the United States. Before the Civil War, lawyers learned their trade primarily through apprenticeship and self-directed study. By the end of the 19th century, the modern legal education system which was developed primarily by Dean Christopher Langdell at Harvard was in place: a bachelor's degree was required for admission to the new model law school, and a law degree was promoted as the best preparation for admission to the bar. William P. LaPiana provides an in-depth study of the intellectual history of the transformation of American legal education during this period. In the process, he offers a revisionist portrait of Langdell, the Dean of Harvard Law School from 1870 to 1900, and the earliest proponent for the modern method of legal education, as well as portraying for the first time the opposition to the changes at Harvard.

This book argues for a three-dimensional view of law and restates the message of Holmes's 'The Path of the Law' for legal educators of today.