Quote#Politics & Power
The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky, but the…
Quote byOliver Wendell Holmes · 1841–1935
Commonly attributed — not confirmed in an authoritative edition. Cited on Wikiquote to: Southern Pacific Company v. Jensen 244 U.S. 205, 222 (1917) (Holmes, J., dissenting; opinion published (21 May 1917)..
English (original)
The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky, but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi sovereign that can be identified; although some decisions with which I have disagreed seem to me to have forgotten the fact.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
More from Oliver Wendell Holmes
The degree of civilization which a people has reached, no doubt, is marked by their anxiety to do as they would be done by.
But as precedents survive like the clavicle in the cat, long after the use they once served is at an end, and the reason for them has been forgotten, the result of following them must often be failure and confusion from the merely logical …
State interference is an evil, where it cannot be shown to be a good.
The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience... 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 …
There are not infrequent times when a bottle of wine, a good dinner, a girl of some trivial sort can fill the hour for me.
It is the merit of the common law that it decides the case first and determines the principle afterwards.