ABSTRACT
In the waning years of the last century, the influential American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes rejected the mechanical view of the law commonly held in English Common Law and in early American and Canadian jurisprudence. The prevailing view was that to make a decision in a case, a judge need only review the facts of the case, identify the relevant principles from common law, and apply those principles to the facts with logic and due diligence. In one of his most famous quotations, Holmes wrote that
The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellowmen, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. (Holmes, 1881, p. 1)
