The Spirit of the Common Law

THE SPIRIT OF THE COMMON LAW is Pound's classic 1921 study of what law means--and the concept and history of rules, judicial process, and legal reasoning--from the Dean of Harvard Law School and given in lectures at Dartmouth College in 1921. It is finally available in a high-quality ebook edition.


Digital reproductions of such classic texts are typically scanned and forgotten, with no proofreading or usable formatting. But the Legal Legends Edition from Quid Pro Books features quality formatting and careful reproduction of the original book into a proper, modern ebook. Includes active TOC, fully linked Index (keyed to original page numbers), and 2012 Notes of the Series Editor by Steven Alan Childress, a law professor at Tulane University.


In this recognized canon of the school of sociological jurisprudence, its leading voice explores the core idea of the common law tempered by a studied awareness that pragmatic and empirical thinking must inform law and judicial decision-making. Although precedent and history are important, Pound notes, and law must be respected as supreme, still decisions and rules have their highest value in their social and political effects. Judges are not above the law, but neither is law above human necessity.


Other high-quality Legal Legends books from Quid Pro include explained and introduced renditions of Llewellyn's THE BRAMBLE BUSH (with new material by Wisconsin's Stewart Macaulay), Cardozo's THE NATURE OF THE JUDICIAL PROCESS (with new material by Harvard's Andrew Kaufman), Holmes' THE [ANNOTATED] COMMON LAW (adding 200 simple explanatory notes), Holmes' THE PATH OF THE LAW and Warren and Brandeis' THE RIGHT TO PRIVACY (with additions by Steven Alan Childress of Tulane), John Chipman Gray's THE NATURE AND SOURCES OF THE LAW, and three works by Woodrow Wilson.