THE PATH OF THE LAW

by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.




10 HARVARD LAW REVIEW 457 (1897)


When we study law we are not studying a mystery but a well-known
profession. We are studying what we shall want in order to appear before
judges, or to advise people in such a way as to keep them out of court.
The reason why it is a profession, why people will pay lawyers to argue
for them or to advise them, is that in societies like ours the command
of the public force is intrusted to the judges in certain cases, and the
whole power of the state will be put forth, if necessary, to carry
out their judgments and decrees. People want to know under what
circumstances and how far they will run the risk of coming against what
is so much stronger than themselves, and hence it becomes a business
to find out when this danger is to be feared. The object of our study,
then, is prediction, the prediction of the incidence of the public force
through the instrumentality of the courts.

The means of the study are a body of reports, of treatises, and of
statutes, in this country and in England, extending back for six hundred
years, and now increasing annually by hundreds. In these sibylline
leaves are gathered the scattered prophecies of the past upon the cases
in which the axe will fall. These are what properly have been called the
oracles of the law. Far the most important and pretty nearly the whole