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In this unique book, Alexander Lian, a practicing commercial litigator, advances the thesis that the most famous article in American jurisprudence, Oliver Wendell Holmes's “The Path of the Law,” presents Holmes's leading ideas on legal education. Through meticulous analysis, Lian explores Holmes's fundamental ideas on law and its study. He puts “The Path of the Law” within the trajectory of Holmes's jurisprudence, from earliest scholarship to The Common Law to the occasional pieces Holmes wrote or delivered after joining the U.S. Supreme Court. Lian takes a close look at the reactions “The Path of the Law” has evoked, both positive and negative, and restates the essay's core teachings for today's legal educators. Lian convincingly shows that Holmes's “theory of legal study” broke down artificial barriers between theory and practice. For contemporary legal educators, Stereoscopic Law reformulates Holmes's fundamental message that the law must been seen and taught three-dimensionally.

Summary

This chapter describes Holmes's two great scholarly works: the twelfth edition of Kent’s Commentaries and The Common Law. Both books entailed a prodigious amount of legal research into the history of the common law. Both were written at a time when the law was rapidly changing to accommodate the increased commercialization and industrialization in the last half of the nineteenth century. Many men – most notably Christopher Columbus Langdell – were proposing new theories of common law decision-making, but Holmes was unique in his historical approach. This chapter explains Holmes’s approach and addresses some of the misunderstandings and criticisms it has generated.

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Stereoscopic Law

6 - The Loneliness of Original Work

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Stereoscopic Law

6 - The Loneliness of Original Work

Summary