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1 results

  • 6 - The Loneliness of Original Work

  • from Part II - The Journey to the Pole
  • Catharine Pierce Wells, Boston College, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    Oliver Wendell Holmes
    Published online:
    13 December 2019
    Print publication:
    02 January 2020, pp 138-161

  • Summary

    This chapter describes Holmes's two great scholarly works: the twelfth edition of Kent’s Commentaries and The Common Law. Both books entailed a prodigious amount of legal research into the history of the common law. Both were written at a time when the law was rapidly changing to accommodate the increased commercialization and industrialization in the last half of the nineteenth century. Many men – most notably Christopher Columbus Langdell – were proposing new theories of common law decision-making, but Holmes was unique in his historical approach. This chapter explains Holmes’s approach and addresses some of the misunderstandings and criticisms it has generated.