ephemera

defrydrychowski.wordpress.com -- ephemera


(a microblog: notes, queries, and whatnot)

"It does not help at all to point out the steps in emancipation that have been taken and to argue prophetically that the rest is to come. We have no concern with the future. It has not come yet." 

Union Trust Co. v. Grosman, 245 U.S. 412 (1918) (Holmes)

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Holmes was the outlier among the Boston pragmatists and pragmaticists.  He seemed to view the traditions of the law as a counterweight to the more free-form thoughts of James et al.  (Though they certainly informed his course in Jurisprudence and subsequent writings.)  The final break, if memory serves, was when James said that religious belief was true if it helped the believer.  Holmes, as a veteran of some bloody campaigns with his Massachusetts-based unit, had his own notions, and they were firm ones.