The Common Law Quotes

“Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Common Law

“The first requirement of a sound body of law is, that it should correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community, whether right or wrong.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Common Law

“Law, being a practical thing, must found itself on actual forces. It is quite enough, therefore, for the law, that man, by an instinct which he shares with the domestic dog, and of which the seal gives a most striking example, will not allow himself to be dispossessed, either by force or fraud, of what he olds, without trying to get it back again. Philosophy may find a hundred reasons to justify the instinct, but it would be totally immaterial if it should condemn it and bid us surrender without a murmur.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Common Law

“The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Common Law

“Law, being a practical thing, must found itself on
actual forces. It is quite enough, therefore, for the law, that man, by an instinct which he shares with the domestic dog, and of which the seal gives a most striking example, will not allow himself to be
dispossessed, either by force or fraud, of what he holds, without trying to get it back again.
Philosophy may find a hundred reasons to justify the instinct, but it would be totally immaterial if it
should condemn it and bid us surrender without a murmur.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Common Law

“a preliminary sketch. Your experience tells you that. But”
― Robert W. Chambers, The Common Law

“Many things which we take for granted have had to be laboriously fought out or thought out in past times.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Common Law

“The law embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Common Law

“State interference is an evil, where it cannot be shown to be a good.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Common Law

“In other words, those great judges, although of course aware that a ship is no more alive than a mill-wheel, thought that not only the law did in fact deal with it as if it were alive, but that it was reasonable that the law should do so. The reader will observe that they do not say simply that it is reasonable on grounds of policy to sacrifice justice to the owner to security for somebody else but that it is reasonable to deal with the vessel as an offending thing. Whatever the hidden ground of policy may be, their thought still clothes itself in personifying language.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Common Law

“The customs, beliefs, or needs of a primitive time establish a rule or a formula. In the course of centuries the custom, belief, or necessity disappears, but the rule remains.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Common Law

“In Massachusetts today, while, on the one hand, there are a great many rules which are quite sufficiently accounted for by their manifest good sense, on the other, there are some which can only be understood by reference to the infancy of procedure among the German tribes, or to the social condition of Rome under the Decemvirs.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Common Law

“The substance of the law at any given time pretty nearly corresponds, so far as it goes, with what is then understood to be convenient; but its form and machinery, and the degree to which it is able to work out desired results, depend very much upon its past.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Common Law