The law, so far as it depends on learning, is indeed, as it has been called, the government of the living by the dead. To a very considerable extent no doubt it is inevitable that the living should be so governed. The past gives us our vocabulary and fixes the limits of our imagination; we cannot get away from it. There is, too, a peculiar logical pleasure in making manifest the continuity between what we are doing and what has been done before. But the present has a right to govern itself so far as it can; and it ought always to be remembered that historic continuity with the past is not a duty, it is only a necessity.
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About Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was us supreme court justice from 1902 to 1932. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Read more on Wikipedia →