Abstract

This article undertakes a rhetorical reading of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s “The Path of the Law” (1897), attending particularly to Holmes’s use of the trope of the “oracle” in his legal philosophy to show how Holmes utilizes this figure to interrogate the Anglo-American legal tradition and to articulate his own, new understanding of the task of the law. For Holmes, lawyers reading the “sibylline leaves” of the common law will inevitably make imperfect predictions about how judges will rule a case. In contrast, Holmes suggests that lawyers should be able to make predictions with the same degree of reliability as scientific hypotheses based on the laws of physics. Similarly, Holmes argues that laws should be considered in terms of desired ends, rather than precedent and tradition, and assessed using the new quantitative social science of statistics. Thus, by turning “prophecy” into a figure of rationality, Holmes calls for a radical reinvention of the law as scientifically based and oriented towards the future.

摘要

本文对小奥利弗·温德尔·霍姆斯 (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.) 的《法律之路》(1897) 进行了修辞解读，特别关注霍姆斯在其法律哲学中对“神谕”这一比喻的使用，以展示霍姆斯如何利用这一形象来质疑英美法律传统，并阐明他自己对法律任务的新理解。对于霍姆斯来说，阅读普通法的“女巫叶子”的律师将不可避免地对法官将如何裁决案件做出不完美的预测。相比之下，霍姆斯认为律师应该能够做出与基于物理定律的科学假设同样可靠的预测。同样，霍姆斯认为，法律应该根据期望的目标而不是先例和传统来考虑，并使用统计的新定量社会科学进行评估。