ABSTRACT
In the years leading up to the publication of The Common Law, Oliver Wendell Holmes positioned himself, but in many ways had also been positioned by his peers, in the vanguard of the modernization not just of the legal profession but of the nation. Over the two decades since taking up the study of the law Holmes had been student, scholar, working lawyer, editor, and, briefly, tutor in constitutional law and then University Lecturer in Jurisprudence at Harvard. Charles William Eliot, Harvard's president, saw Holmes as an ally in his plan to radically reform the college. Not surprisingly, Holmes saw himself, and was seen by others, as part of the forward march of progress in matters professional as much as philosophical. In his 1895 Harvard Address, "The Soldier's Faith", Holmes drew a clear distinction between commerce and conflict, and bemoaned the fact that war is out of fashion in a world whose aspirations were those of wealth.
