“The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience… 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.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. , book The Common Law

The Common Law (1881), p. 1.
1880s

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Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. 107

United States Supreme Court justice 1841–1935

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“The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience… 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.”

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Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. 107

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