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Three Nearly Sacred Books In Western Law, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

We American lawyers pride ourselves on the secular nature of our legal system. We celebrate the separation of Church and State. We think that the moving spirit of the law is to be found not in eternal truths about the universe but in the contingent needs of social and economic policy. "The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience," said Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in a sentence that since 1881 has broadcast to every new generation of lawyers the pragmatic foundations of their craft.

We assume that we have little in common with the great …