The Common Law.

HOLMES JR., Oliver Wendell.

Item Number: 117862

Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1881.

First edition, first issue with printer’s imprint at base of copyright page of this landmark work in American law. Octavo, original cloth. In very good condition with the spine gilt quite fresh and bright. A very sharp example.

"To the legal historian, Justice Holmes was to be the leading prophet of the new era. Holmes was part of the generation that had sat at the feet of Darwin and Spencer When Holmes asserted in his Common Law that ‘the law finds its philosophy (in) the nature of human needs,’ he was sounding the clarion of 20th-century jurisprudence If the 19th century was one of Legal Darwinism, the 20th was, ultimately, to be that of Mr. Justice Holmes" (The Law in America, 190-91).