The Common Law

Holmes, O. W. J. (1881). The Common Law.

Type

Book

Intellectual base

Review or monograph

Year

1881

Link

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2449/2449-h/2449-h.htm

Cited from

computer_science, law_governance

Cited by

2 citations across 2 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Dependency
  • Constraints answer "what is forbidden?"; dependencies answer "what is required?", a grammatical separation Holmes (1881) traced through contract doctrine, where consideration is a required precondition for enforceability rather than a constraint on the bargain's content.
• Precedent (Stare Decisis)
  • Consistency can emerge from common principles without precedent; precedent enforces consistency even when decision-makers disagree on underlying principle, a separation between rule and life-of-the-law that Holmes (1881) makes foundational to common-law thought.

    This sourceFoundational text of American legal realism: separates the "logic" of legal rules from the "life of the law" (experience, policy, equity), grounding the distinction between consistency as a property and precedent as a mechanism that can enforce it across disagreement.

    Supported in partVerified against the work's full text

    Holmes does separate logical consistency from the experiential 'life of the law', but never says precedent enforces consistency across disagreement on principle.

    “It is something to show that the consistency of a system requires a particular result, but it is not all. The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.”

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

Verification

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