What Is Experience? What Is Logic?

Oliver Wendell Holmes was perhaps our most famous judge, and he is the great oracle of American legal thought, and his legal pragmatism is still influential in our law today . Holmes served as an appellate judge for almost fifty years, twenty on one of the most important state supreme courts in the United states, and twenty-nine on the U.S. Supreme court. He wrote well two thousands of judicial opinions , There must have been few issue in the state or federal law that Holmes did not rule on at least once . In addition,he left us a celebrated body of extraordinary writings. Before he became a judge,he had written a classic of legal theory—The Common Law, which began with the famous proposition that the life of law had not been logic but experience. Unfortunately, the proposition has been subjected to much misreading.This paper attempted to offer an interpretation of the proposition to reveal why Holmes had been anti-logic,what he had been actually against and what was his knowledge about the function and limit of logic in law .This paper also attempted to clarify some potential misunderstanding in order to give an full understanding of the proposition.This paper is divided into three parts. The first part is about Holmes and pragmatism.Although Holmes'legal thought has been subject to much dispute,most of people count him as a pragmatist.Pragmatism is a philosophy born in the late nineteenth century in Europe,Britain,and most significantly American.American pragmatism was ,in a very real sense, the first truly American philosophy.Holmes was a fellow traveler of the founder of this school of thought as a member of the Mataphysical Club in Boston in the late 1860'.Forming a lifelong friendship with the populizer of pragmatism, William James,John Dewey, It is becoming clearer his conception of law jurisprudence, and legal theory were deeply influenced by association with the original pragmatists at an early formative stage.Holmes treated law as a practical enterprise in two senses.First, law is constituted of practice—contextual,rooted in custom and shared expectations.Second,it is instrumental, a means for achieving socially desired ends.The first point suggests the perspective of the historical school of jurisprudence;the second suggests Benthamite utilitarian positivism .It is to Holmes that owe the first clear statement of such a synthesis.The well-known words that follow that proposition—the life of law has not been logic but experience in The Common Law elaborate Holmes'conception of law: The felt necessities of the time,the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy,avowed or unconscious,even the prejudices which the judge share with their fellow-men,have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining how men should be governed."General propositions do not decide concrete cases," Holmes continued his attack on the Langdell's legal formalism,and through his whole life.