Copyright (c) 2001 First Things 112 (April 2001): 23-29. There
is a sense in which twentieth–century legal philosophy began on
January 8, 1897. On that day, Oliver Wendell Holmes, then a
justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, spoke at
a ceremony dedicating the new hall of the Boston University
School of Law. In his remarks, which were published that spring
in the Harvard Law Review under the title The Path of the Law,
Holmes sought to debunk the jurisprudence of the past and to
propose a new course for modern jurists and legal scholars.
Holmes’ themes—the question of law’s objectivity and the
relationship between law and morality—have preoccupied legal
philosophy in the century that was then dawning and has now
drawn to a close. The opening sentence of Holmes’ lecture
invited his audience—lawyers, law professors, and law
students—to consider what it is we study when we study law. We
are not, he said, studying a “mystery,” but, rather, “a
well–known profession.” People are willing to pay lawye