The Common Law.

HOLMES JR., Oliver Wendell.

Item Number: 139630

Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1881.

First edition, first issue of this landmark work in American law. Octavo, original cloth, gilt titles to the spine. In near fine condition. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. An exceptional 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).