ABSTRACT
This paper deals with a small part of a large topic. It considers the two ends of a strand in a line of thought on legal reasoning that began, in the United States, about 1880 in the scholarly writings of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and culminated, there, in a book Ethical Systems and Legal Ideals, published in 1933 by the legal realist Felix S. Cohen. This line of thought may be described as a critique of so-called “legal formalism.” Parallels to this critique may be found in contemporaneous Continental writers; it was also suggested, with differing emphases, by such American jurists and legal philosophers as Roscoe Pound, Justice Benjamin Cardozo, and Morris R. Cohen, Felix’s father. Aside from the last, however, none of these other writers will be mentioned again here. I begin with Holmes because he initiated the critique and because his work helps us in identifying the object under attack. Felix Cohen is taken as the end-point of this critique because he not only absorbed its earlier details but also because he presented the particular strand in which I am interested in a more sustained and fresher manner than other American theorists.
