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20 Ratio Juris 1 (2007)

handle is hein.journals/raju20 and id is 1 raw text is: Ratio Juris. Vol. 20 No. 1 March 2007 (1-31) On Logic in the Law: Something, but not All SUSAN HAACK Abstract. In 1880, when Oliver Wendell Holmes (later to be a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) criticized the logical theology of law articulated by Christopher Columbus Langdell (the first Dean of Harvard Law School), neither Holmes nor Langdell was aware of the revolution in logic that had begun, the year before, with Frege's Begriffsschrift. But there is an important element of truth in Holmes's insistence that a legal system cannot be adequately understood as a system of axioms and corollaries; and this element of truth is not obviated by the more powerful logical techniques that are now available. 1. An Old Story, and Its Relevance Today In one of the best-known passages of The Common Law, Oliver Wendell Holmes writes: It is something to show that the consistency of a system requires a particular result; but it is not all. The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.' What probably is not so well known is that the best-known sentence of this well-known passage-The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience-had already appeared in print the year before, in Holmes's review of the second edition of Christopher Columbus Langdell's Selection of Cases on the Law of Contracts. This book of Langdell's, Holmes writes, is an extraordinary production,-equally extraordinary in its merits and its limitations. Chief ' Holmes (1881), in Novick, ed., 1995, 115. 2007 Susan Haack.

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