Book Description
Only paperback edition of great legal classic by noted Supreme Court Justice. Lucid, accessible coverage, from a historical perspective, of liability, criminal law, torts, bail, possession and ownership, contracts, successions, many other aspects of civil and criminal law. Indispensable reading for lawyers, political scientists, interested general readers. New introduction by Sheldon M. Novick. Table of Cases.
From the Publisher
59th printing
The Common Law FROM THE PUBLISHER
The Common Law changed America forever. The lectures - which were given at the Lowell Institute in Boston and subsequently published in 1880 - created a buzz of excitement that enveloped the New England intellectual community. Over a century later, we can look back at The Common Law and still feel the same sense of excitement that our predecessors did, virtually undiminished by the tumultuous decades of American jurisprudence that have followed. It remains an exhilarating landmark in law because both its content and its style, its substance and its process, perfectly mirror what common law is: a complex and diffuse combination of actual cases, history, analysis, and philosophy - all woven together to create the rules by which we live.
About the Author:
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. -- who grew up in the shadow of his famous father, the great doctor and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. -- set out to make his mark on the world by the age of forty. His first notoriety among the legal community came when he edited the monumental work of legal scholarship Kentᄑs Commentaries. Just shy of his fortieth birthday, he delivered The Common Law to very positive reviews. From that point, his career was meteoric and included a near three-decade tenure on the Supreme Court of the United States.
SYNOPSIS
Holmes (1841-1935), prior to his tenures on the benches of the Massachusetts Supreme Court and the US Supreme Court (where he became known as the "Great Dissenter") penned this academic defense of the common law system against the critiques of the utilitarians and the neo-Kantians/Hegelians suggesting the common law system lacked order. Implicitly approaching the topic from the perspective of philosophical pragmatism, according to the new introduction appended to this 1881work, Holmes argued that the common law system allowed the law to evolve in response to the changing social environment. Holmes presents a general theory of civil and criminal liability that relies on this evolutionary perspective (not without a fair bit of social Darwinism) and also considers the history and theory of contracts. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR