“The life of the law has not been logic – it has been experience”
- He is often known as the intellectual father of Legal Realism
- Holmes was a lawyer for 15 years, a judge on the Supreme Court of Massachusetts for 20 years and an Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court for 30 years
- In his famous book The Common Law (1881), he set out some of his views – he said that the only proper source of law was judicial decisions
- In this book he also tried to move the law away from legal formalism
- He said that judges decide cases based on the facts, and then present a rationale afterwards
- He argued that the real reason behind judge’s decision came from somewhere outside the law
Bad-Man Theory – a short summary:
The Bad-Man Theory is a jurisprudential doctrine or belief, according to which a bad person’s view of the law represents the best test of what exactly the law is because that person shall carefully and precisely calculate what the rules allow and operate up to the rules’ limits. This theory is also known as Prediction Theory.
This theory was first adopted by Oliver Wendell Holmes, who mentioned that a society’s legal system is defined by predicting how the law affects a person, as opposed to considering the ethics or morals underlying the law.