Holmes' Common Law as Legal and Social Science

"My notion in writing these articles," Holmes told a friend, speaking of the American Law Review pieces" on which he later based his lectures2 on The Common Law,' "is to take up from time to time the cardinal principles and conceptions of the law and make a new and more fundamental analysis of them For the purpose of constructing a new Jurisprudence or New First Book of the law. ' 4 Holmes' declaration of intent makes explicit what it is hard for a reader of The Common Law to doubt: The work is primarily one of legal theory with excursions into legal history to support the theory. Thus it is as a work of theory and not of history that The Common Law must be assessed. The first reaction that a reader or even a re-reader is likely to come away with from this famously Delphic text is one of bafflement at its recklessly miscellaneous quality. One is quite as