Judges Commons^™

Holmes' Failure, Louise Weinberg

Michigan Law Review

I have just set down the March 1997 Harvard Law Review, with its centennial celebration of Oliver Wendell Holmes' The Path of the Law. The Path of the Law is a grand thing, in my view Holmes' best thing. But just the same, I find myself surprised that on this occasion none of its celebrants raised what has always seemed to me a weakness of the piece, and of Holmes' much earlier book, The Common Law. This is a weakness that is at once a reflection and a forecast of the failure of its author. Writers today do seem to …