Conclusion

Abstract

This book has posited a connection between two seemingly remote things: between a late nineteenth century revolution in law and an early twenty-first century revolution in computing. The jurist on whose work we’ve drawn, if he’d been transported to the present day, we think would have been open to the connection. Holmes’s early milieu had been one of science, medicine, and letters, these being fields in which his father had held a prominent place and in which their city, in Holmes’s youth, in America had held the preeminent place.2 Leading lights of nineteenth century philosophy and science numbered among Holmes’s friends and interlocutors at home and abroad in the years immediately after the Civil War. Holmes continued throughout his life to engage with people whom today we would call technologists. His interest in statistics and in the natural sciences was broad and deep and visible in Holmes’s vast output as a scholar and a judge. Lawyering and judging, to Holmes, were jobs but also objects to be searched for deeper understanding.