I recently had the pleasant opportunity to work through a difficult book often thought to be very boring: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s The Common Law (1881). I think The Common Law’s anesthetic reputation is unearned: the book is, admittedly, rambling and technical, but it is also stylistically enchanting. Its best passages are as weird and invigorating as the best passages in the work of Holmes’s friend William James (the two were in close correspondence in the period during which The Common Law was drafted). Read more