Holmes’ The Path of the Law, Available as an eBook, hardback, and paperback

New to the Legal Legends Series is Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “The Path of the Law,” from his famous and influential Harvard Law Review article. Now available digitally from Barnes & Noble for Nook, Amazon for Kindle, and at Apple iBooks. Features a new Foreword and biographical summary by Tulane law professor Steven Alan Childress, and photographs of Holmes over decades of his exceptional career (and five stages of the famous mustache). Also in a modern and assignable paperback at Amazon, below, and other retailers, and in hardcover clothbound edition.

Building on the pragmatic conception of law he introduced in his book The Common Law, Holmes — by 1897 a jurist on Massachusetts’ highest court and soon to be an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court — explored the limits and sources of law, as well as “the forces which determine its content and growth.” This presentation is seen as laying down the gauntlet to legal scholars and judges in what would be known as the emerging “legal realism” movement. Later legal thinkers like Pound, Llewellyn and Douglas followed his lead, and that lead is seen most clearly in this work.

By the time of this pithy and accessible writing, Holmes had crystallized and clarified that conception of law which he had, in introducing his earlier book, described in the famous statement “the life of the law is not logic: it is experience.” Taking that observation to the next level, this work made it clear that judges make law, not simply finding it in books — and they must draw on practical effects and ends in declaring legal rules, not simply reasoning from precedent. He does not hedge: it is a “fallacy” to think that “the only force at work in the development of the law is logic.”

Part of the Legal Legends Series from Quid Pro Books, this ebook features quality digital formatting and presentation, close proofreading from the original text, and photographs of the author at various stages of his prodigious career. Also available in the Series are explained and introduced editions of The Common Law; plus Benjamin Cardozo, The Nature of the Judicial Process (with Foreword by Harvard’s Andrew Kaufman), Woodrow Wilson, The State and Federal Governments of the United States, and many others.

Amazon for Kindle.   [Also at Amazon UK for Kindle.]

Barnes & Noble for Nook.

Also available at the Apple iTunes or iBooks bookstore (see preview here).

Paperback: available from our eStore page, with fulfillment by Amazon; and from the general Amazon site and other booksellers. Features photographs, biographical summary and the Foreword of the Nook and Kindle editions. Adoptable for classrooms in multiple formats for easy assignment by teachers and thesis advisers. Very low cost.

New HARDBACK also available (published Feb. 2015), at such retailers as noted above, including Ingram, YBP, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.com.

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CATALOGING:

ISBN 9781610278447 (hbk., 2015 printing); list price $17.99

ISBN 9781610279857 (pbk.); list $9.99

ISBN 9781610279833 (ebook)

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