The Common Law is a book written by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in 1881,[1] 21 years before Holmes became an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

The book is about common law in the United States, including torts, property, contracts, and crime.

A famous aphorism appears on the first page of the book: "The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience."

Holmes's pronouncement is a qualification of a dictum by the famous seventeenth-century English jurist Sir Edward Coke: "Reason is the life of the law.

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