“Oracles of the Law:” Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s Legal Futurism

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.