Wednesday, May 26, 2021
The law is always reactionary. All law is created in response to something that happened. Holmes was right: the life of the law has not been logic, but experience. That said, the way we are trained to interpret experience is also important, and that doesn't seem to be much commented upon. I quote Holmes frequently, but let's be realistic: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who fought and was wounded at Antietam, is an odd authority to look to when we are considering how to understand the jurisprudence of the 21st century. As original a thinker as he was we have to acknowledge that his thinking was necessarily informed by the education he received from figures from an even more distant antiquity. If that is true of a genius like Holmes what can we expect from ordinary judges- or lawyers, for that matter? The calcified habits of our practices are difficult to break out of.
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