Holmes Notes, Continued

A proper name, when used in business or in pleading, means one individual thing, and
no other, as every one knows, and therefore one to whom such a name is used must find
out at his peril what the object designated is.

If there are no circumstances which make the use deceptive on either side, each is entitled
to insist on the meaning favorable to him for the word as used by him, and neither is
entitled to insist on that meaning for the word as used by the other.

So far from mistake having been the ground of decision, as mistake, its only bearing, as it
seems to me, was to establish that neither party knew that he was understood by the other
to use the word “Peerless” in the sense which the latter gave to it. In that event there
would perhaps have been a binding contract, because, if a man uses a word to which he
knows the other party attaches, and understands him to attach, a certain meaning, he may
be held to that meaning, and not be allowed to give it any other.

Suppose that A agreed to buy, and B agreed to sell, “these barrels of mackerel,” and that
the barrels in question turn out to contain
salt. There is mutual mistake as to the contents of the barrels, and no
fraud on either side. I suppose the contract would be void. (Page 280).

If there had been fraud on the seller’s part, or if he had known

what the barrels really contained, the buyer might have had a right to
insist on delivery of the inferior article. Fraud would perhaps have
made the contract valid at his option. Because, when a man qualifies
sensible words with others which he knows, on secret grounds, are
insensible when so applied, he may fairly be taken to authorize his
promisee to insist on the possible part of his promise being performed, if the promisee is
willing to forego the rest. (Page 281).

The distinctions of the law are founded on experience, not on (Page 281). logic. It
therefore does not make the dealings of men dependent on a
mathematical accuracy.

Whatever is promised, a man has a right to be

paid for, if it is not given; but it does not follow that the absence of
some insignificant detail will authorize him to throw up the contract,
still less that it will prevent the formation of a contract, which is the
matter now under consideration. The repugnant terms must both be
very important,—so important that the court thinks that, if either is
omitted, the contract would be different in substance from that which
the words of the parties seemed to express. (Page 282).
6
For it is further to be said that, so far as by
one of the terms of a contract the thing promised or the promisee is
identified by sight and hearing, that term so far preponderates over
all others that it is very rare for the failure of any other element of
description to prevent the making of a contract.
7
The most obvious (Page 282).

of seeming exceptions is where the object is not in fact so identified,

but only its covering or wrapper.
Of course the performance of a promise may be made conditional
on all the terms stipulated from the other side being complied with,
but conditions attaching to performance can never come into consideration until a
contract has been made, and so far the question has
been touching the existence of a contract in the first instance. (Page 283).

There might conceivably be cases in which, taking into account the

nature of the contract, the words used could be said to embody the
representation as a term by construction. For instance, it might be
said that the true and well-understood purport of a contract of insurance is not, as the
words seem to say, to take the risk of any loss by fire
or perils of the sea, however great the risk may be, but to take a risk (Page 283).
of a certain magnitude, and no other, which risk has been calculated
mathematically from the statements of the party insured. The extent
of the risk taken is not specified in the policy, because the old forms
and established usage are otherwise, but the meaning is perfectly understood. (Page
284).

7. “Præsentia corporis tollit errorem nominis.” Cf. Byles, J., in Way v. Hearne, 32
L. J. n. s. C. P. 34, 40. But cf. the conflicting opinions in Reg. v. Middleton, L. R. 2 C. C.
38, (Page 282). 45, 57. It would seem that a proper name or other identification of an
object or person
as specific may have the same effect as an actual identification by the senses, because it
refers to such an identification, although in a less direct way. (Page 283).

If a condition is attached to the contract’s coming into being, there (Page 284). is as yet
no contract. Either party may withdraw, at will, until the condition is determined. There is
no obligation, although there may be
an offer or a promise, and hence there is no relation between the parties which requires
discussion here. But some conditions seemingly
arising out of a contract already made are conditions of this sort.
Such is always the case if the condition of a promise lies within the
control of the promisor’s own will. For instance, a promise to pay for
clothes if made to the customer’s satisfaction, has been held in Massachusetts to make
the promisor his own final judge.
8
 So interpreted,
it appears to me to be no contract at all, until the promisor’s satisfaction is expressed. His
promise is only to pay if he sees fit, and such
a promise cannot be made a contract because it cannot impose any
obligation.
9
If the promise were construed to mean that the clothes
should be paid for provided they were such as ought to satisfy the
promisor,
10
and thus to make the jury the arbiter, there would be a
contract, because the promisor gives up control over the event, but it
would be subject to a condition in the sense of the present analysis. (Page 285).

The conditions which a contract may contain have been divided

by theorists into conditions precedent and conditions subsequent.
The distinction has even been pronounced of great importance. It
must be admitted that, if the course of pleading be taken as a test, it is
so. In some cases, the plaintiff has to state that a condition has been
performed in order to put the defendant to his answer; in others, it is
left to the defendant to set up that a condition has been broken.
In one sense, all conditions are subsequent; in another, all are precedent. All are
subsequent to the first stage of the obligation.
11
Take,
for instance, the case of a promise to pay for work if done to the satis- (Page 285).
faction of an architect. The condition is a clear case of what is called a
condition precedent. There can be no duty to pay until the architect is
satisfied. But there can be a contract before that moment, because the
determination whether the promisor shall pay or not is no longer
within his control. Hence the condition is subsequent to the existence
of the obligation.
On the other hand, every condition subsequent is precedent to the
incidence of the burden of the law. If we look at the law as it would be
regarded by one who had no scruples against doing anything which
he could do without incurring legal consequences, it is obvious that
the main consequence attached by the law to a contract is a greater or
less possibility of having to pay money. The only question from the
purely legal point of view is whether the promisor will be compelled
to pay. And the important moment is that at which that point is settled. All conditions are
precedent to that.
But all conditions are precedent, not only in this extreme sense,
but also to the existence of the plaintiff’s cause of action. (Page 286).

action. When a
man sues, the question is not whether he has had a cause of action in
the past, but whether he has one then. He has not one then, unless the
year is still running. If it were left for the defendant to set up the lapse
of the year, that would be due to the circumstance that the order of
pleading does not require a plaintiff to meet all possible defences, and
to set out a case unanswerable except by denial. The point at which
the law calls on the defendant for an answer varies in different cases. (Page 286).

A condition properly so called is an event, the happening of which

authorizes the person in whose favor the condition is reserved to treat
the contract as if it had not been made,—to avoid it, as is commonly
said,—that is, to insist on both parties being restored to the position
in which they stood before the contract was made. When a condition
operates as such, it lets in an outside force to destroy the existing state
of things. For although its existence is due to consent of parties, its
operation depends on the choice of one of them. When a condition is
broken, the person entitled to insist on it may do so if he chooses; (Page 287).

but he may, if he prefers, elect to keep the contract on foot. He gets

his right to avoid it from the agreement, but the avoidance comes
from him.
Hence it is important to distinguish those stipulations which have
this extreme effect from those which only interpret the extent of a
promise, or define the events to which it applies. And as it has just
been shown that a condition need not be insisted on as such, we must
further distinguish between its operation by way of avoidance, which
is peculiar to it, and its incidental working by way of interpretation
and definition, in common with other clauses not conditions.
This is best illustrated by taking a bilateral contract between A and
B, where A’s undertaking is conditional on B’s doing what he promises to do, and
where, after A has got a certain distance in his task, B
breaks his half of the bargain. For instance, A is employed as a clerk
by B, and is wrongfully dismissed in the middle of a quarter. In favor
of A, the contract is conditional on B’s keeping his agreement to employ him. Whether
A insists on the condition or not, he is not bound
to do any more.
14 (Page 288).

One or two more illustrations will be useful. A promises to deliver,

and B promises to accept and pay for, certain goods at a certain time
and place. When the time comes, neither party is on hand. Neither
would be liable to an action, and, according to what has been said,
each has done all that he promised to do in the event which has happened, to wit,
nothing. It might be objected that, if A has done all that
he is bound to do, he ought to be able to sue B, since performance or (Page 289).

readiness to perform was all that was necessary to give him that right,
 and conversely the same might be said of B. On the other hand, considering either B or
A as defendant, the same facts would be a complete defence. The puzzle is largely one of
words.
A and B have, it is true, each performed all that they promised to
do at the present stage, because they each only promised to act in the
event of the other being ready and willing to act at the same time. But
the readiness and willingness, although not necessary to the performance of either
promise, and therefore not a duty, was necessary in
order to present a case to which the promise of action on the other
side would apply. Hence, although A and B have each performed their
own promise, they have not performed the condition to their right
of demanding more from the other side. The performance of that
condition is purely optional until one side has brought it within the
scope of the other’s undertaking by performing it himself. But it is
performance in the latter sense, that is, the satisfying of all conditions,
as well as the keeping of his own promises, which is necessary to give
A or B a right of action. (Page 290).
Fraud and misrepresentation thus need to be considered once (Page 290).

*But it has been shown, in an earlier Lecture, that the law does not
go on the principle that a man is answerable for all the consequences
of all his acts. An act is indifferent in itself. It receives its character
from the concomitant facts known to the actor at the time. If a man
states a thing reasonably believing that he is speaking from knowledge, it is contrary to
the analogies of the law to throw the peril of the
truth upon him unless he agrees to assume that peril, and he did not
do so in the case supposed, as the representation was not made part
of the contract. (Page 291).

Fraudulent representations outside a contract can never, it would

seem, go to anything except the motives for making it. If outside the
contract, they cannot often affect its interpretation. A promise in certain words has a
definite meaning, which the promisor is presumed
to understand. If A says to B, I promise you to buy this barrel and
its contents, his words designate a person and thing identified by the
senses, and they signify nothing more. There is no repugnancy, and
if that person is ready to deliver that thing, the purchaser cannot
say that any term in the contract itself is not complied with. (Page 292).

It is no doubt only by reason of a condition construed into the

contract that fraud is a ground of rescission. Parties could agree, if
they chose, that a contract should be binding without regard to truth
or falsehood outside of it on either part. (Page 292).
But, as has been said before in these Lectures, although the law
starts from the distinctions and uses the language of morality, it necessarily ends in
external standards not dependent on the actual consciousness of the individual. So it has
happened with fraud. If a man
makes a representation, knowing facts which by the average standard (Page 292).

The courts of Massachusetts, at least, go much further. They seem to hold that any
material
statement made by a man as of his own knowledge, or in such a way
as fairly to be understood as made of his own knowledge, is fraudulent if untrue,
irrespective of the reasons he may have had for believing it and for believing that he
knew it.
16
It is clear, therefore, that a
representation may be morally innocent, and yet fraudulent in theory
of law. (Page 293).

making. But neither the

contract nor the implied condition calls for the existence of the facts
as to which the false representations were made. They call only for the
absence of certain false representations. The condition is not that the
promisee shall be a certain other B, or that the contents of the barrel
shall be mackerel, but that the promisee has not lied to him about
material facts.
Then the question arises, How do you determine what facts are
material? As the facts are not required by the contract, the only way in (Page 293).

which they can be material is that a belief in their being true is likely
to have led to the making of the contract.
It is not then true, as it is sometimes said, that the law does not
concern itself with the motives for making contracts. On the contrary, the whole scope of
fraud outside the contract is the creation of
false motives and the removal of true ones. And this consideration
will afford a reasonable test of the cases in which fraud will warrant
rescission. It is said that a fraudulent representation must be material
to have that effect. But how are we to decide whether it is material or
not? If the above argument is correct, it must be by an appeal to ordinary experience to
decide whether a belief that the fact was as represented would naturally have led to, or a
contrary belief would naturally have prevented, the making of the contract. (Page 294).

If the belief would not naturally have had such an effect, either in
general or under the known circumstances of the particular case, the
fraud is immaterial. If a man is induced to contract with another by a
fraudulent representation of the latter that he is a great-grandson of
Thomas Jefferson, I do not suppose that the contract would be voidable unless the
contractee knew that, for special reasons, his lie would
 tend to bring the contract about.
The conditions or grounds for avoiding a contract which have
been dealt with thus far are conditions concerning the conduct of the
parties outside of the contract itself. Still confining myself to conditions arising by
construction of law,—that is to say, not directly and
in terms attached to a promise by the literal meaning of the words in
which it is expressed,—I now come to those which concern facts to
which the contract does in some way refer. (Page 294).

Here again we come on the law of representations, but in a new

phase. Being a part of the contract, it is always possible that their truth
should make a condition of the contract wholly irrespective of any
question of fraud. And it often is so in fact. It is not, however, every
representation embodied in the words used on one side which will
make a condition in favor of the other party. Suppose A agrees to sell,
and B agrees to buy, “A’s seven-year-old sorrel horse Eclipse, now in
the possession of B on trial,” and in fact the horse is chestnut-colored,
not sorrel. I do not suppose that B could refuse to pay for the horse
on that ground. If the law were so foolish as to aim at merely formal
consistency, it might indeed be said that there was as absolute a repugnancy between the
different terms of this contract as in the case
of an agreement to sell certain barrels of mackerel, where the barrels
turned out to contain salt. If this view were adopted, there would not
be a contract subject to a condition, there would be no contract at all.
But in truth there is a contract, and there is not even a condition. As (Page 295).

But when
words of description are determined to be a warranty, the meaning of
the decision is not merely that the party using them binds himself to
answer for their truth, but that their truth is a condition of the contract.
For instance, in a leading case
20
the agreement was that the plaintiff’s ship, then in the port of Amsterdam, should, with
all possible
despatch, proceed direct to Newport, England, and there load a cargo
of coals for Hong Kong. At the date of the charter-party the vessel was
not in Amsterdam, but she arrived there four days later. The plaintiff
had notice that the defendant considered time important. It was held
that the presence of the vessel in the port of Amsterdam at the date of
the contract was a condition, the breach of which entitled the defendant to refuse to load,
and to rescind the contract. If the view were
adopted that a condition must be a future event, and that a prom- (Page 296).

ise purporting to be conditional on a past or present event is either

absolute or no promise at all, it would follow that in this case the defendant had never
made a promise.
21
He had only promised if circumstances existed which did not exist. I have already stated
my objections to this way of looking at such cases,
22
and will only add that
the courts, so far as I am aware, do not sanction it, and certainly did
not in this instance.
There is another ground for holding the charter-party void and no
contract, instead of regarding it as only voidable, which is equally
against authority, which nevertheless I have never been able to answer
wholly to my satisfaction. In the case put, the representation of the
lessor of the vessel concerned the vessel itself, and therefore entered
into the description of the thing the lessee agreed to take. I do not
quite see why there is not as fatal a repugnancy between the different
terms of this contract as was found in that for the sale of the barrels
of salt described as containing mackerel. (Page 297).

voidable. But, on the other hand, when the repugnancy (Page 297). is between terms
which are both essential, it is fatal to the very existence of the contract. How then do we
decide whether a given term is
essential? (Page 298).

essential? Surely the best way of finding out is by seeing how the parties have dealt with
it. For want of any expression on their part we
may refer to the speech and dealings of every day,
24
and say that, if its
absence would make the subject-matter a different thing, its presence
is essential to the existence of the agreement. But the parties may
agree that anything, however trifling, shall be essential, as well as that
anything, however important, shall not be; and if that essential is part
of the contract description of a specific thing which is also identified
by reference to the senses, how can there be a contract in its absence
any more than if the thing is in popular speech different in kind from
its description? The qualities that make sameness or difference of
kind for the purposes of a contract are not determined by Agassiz or
Darwin, or by the public at large, but by the will of the parties, which
decides that for their purposes the characteristics insisted on are such
and such.
25
Now, if this be true, what evidence can there be that a certain requirement is essential,
that without it the subject-matter will
be different in kind from the description, better than that one party
has required and the other given a warranty of its presence? Yet the
 contract description of the specific vessel as now in the port of Amsterdam, although
held to be an implied warranty, does not seem to
have been regarded as making the contract repugnant and void, but
only as giving the defendant the option of avoiding it. (Page 298).

It might be said that there is no repugnancy in the charterer’s

promise, because he only promises to load a certain ship, and that the
words “now in the port of Amsterdam” are merely matter of history
when the time for loading comes, and no part of the description of
the vessel which he promised to load. But the moment those words
are decided to be essential they become part of the description, and
the promise is to load a certain vessel which is named the Martaban,
and which was in the port of Amsterdam at the date of the contract.
So interpreted, it is repugnant.
Probably the true solution is to be found in practical considerations. At any rate, the fact
is that the law has established three degrees in the effect of repugnancy. If one of the
repugnant terms is
wholly insignificant, it is simply disregarded, or at most will only
found a claim for damages. The law would be loath to hold a contract
void for repugnancy in present terms, when if the same terms were
only promised a failure of one of them would not warrant a refusal to
perform on the other side. (Page 299).

We may now pass from undertakings that certain facts are true at
the time of making the contract, to undertakings that certain facts
shall be true at some later time,—that is, to promises properly so
called. The question is when performance of the promise on one side
is a condition to the obligation of the contract on the other. In practice, this question is
apt to be treated as identical with another, which,
as has been shown earlier, is a distinct point; namely, when performance on one side is a
condition of the right to call for performance
on the other. It is of course conceivable that a promise should be limited to the case of
performance of the things promised on the other
side, and yet that a failure of the latter should not warrant a rescission
of the contract. Wherever one party has already received a substantial
benefit under the contract of a kind which cannot be restored, it is
too late to rescind, however important a breach may be committed
later by the other side. Yet he may be excused from going farther. Suppose a contract is
made for a month’s labor, ten dollars to be paid (Page 300).

down, not to be recovered except in case of rescission for the laborer’s

fault, and thirty dollars at the end of the month. If the laborer should
wrongfully stop work at the end of a fortnight, I do not suppose that
the contract could be rescinded, and that the ten dollars could be recovered as money had
and received;
28
 but, on the other hand, the employer would not be bound to pay the thirty dollars, and of
course he
could sue for damages on the contract.
29
But, for the most part, a breach of promise which discharges the
promisee from further performance on his side will also warrant rescission, so that no
great harm is done by the popular confusion of
the two questions. Where the promise to perform on one side limited
to the case of performance on the other, the contract is generally conditioned on it also.
In what follows, I shall take up the cases which I
wish to notice without stopping to consider whether the contract was
in a strict sense conditioned on performance of the promise on one
side, or whether the true construction was merely that the promise
on the other side was limited to that event. (Page 301).

Another very clear one is found in contracts for the sale or lease of
a thing, and the like. Here the qualities or characteristics which the
owner promises that the thing furnished shall possess, go to describe
the thing which the buyer promises to accept. If any of the promised
traits are wanting in the thing tendered, the buyer may refuse to accept, not merely on the
ground that he has not been offered the
equivalent for keeping his promise, but also on the ground that he
never promised to accept what is offered him.
31
It has been seen that,
where the contract contains a statement touching the condition of (Page 302).

Another very clear one is found in contracts for the sale or lease of
a thing, and the like. Here the qualities or characteristics which the
owner promises that the thing furnished shall possess, go to describe
the thing which the buyer promises to accept. If any of the promised
traits are wanting in the thing tendered, the buyer may refuse to accept, not merely on the
ground that he has not been offered the
equivalent for keeping his promise, but also on the ground that he
never promised to accept what is offered him.
31
It has been seen that,
where the contract contains a statement touching the condition of (Page 302).

For the requirement of security shows that the party requiring it (Page 303).
was not content to rely on the simple promise of the other side, which
he would be compelled to do if he had to perform before the security was given, and thus
the very object of requiring it would be defeated. (Page 304).

This last case suggests what is very forcibly impressed on any one
 who studies the cases,—that, after all, the most important element of
decision is not any technical, or even any general principle of contracts, but a
consideration of the nature of the particular transaction
as a practical matter. Suppose A promises B to do a day’s work for two
dollars, and B promises A to pay two dollars for a day’s work. There
the two promises cannot be performed at the same time. The work
will take all day, the payment half a minute. How are you to decide
which is to be done first, that is to say, which promise is dependent
upon performance on the other side? It is only by reference to the
habits of the community and to convenience. It is not enough to say
that on the principle of equivalency a man is not presumed to intend
to pay for a thing until he has it. The work is payment for the money,
as much as the money for the work, and one must be paid for in advance. The question
is, why, if one man is not presumed to intend to
pay money until he has money’s worth, the other is presumed to intend to give money’s
worth before he has money. An answer cannot be obtained from any general theory. The
fact that employers, as
a class, can be trusted for wages more safely than the employed for
their labor, that the employers have had the power and have been the
law-makers, or other considerations, (Page 304). considerations, it matters not what,
have determined that the work is to be done first. But the grounds of decision
are purely practical, and can never be elicited from grammar or from
logic. (Page 304).

I
n t h e L e c t u r e on Possession, I tried to show that the notion
of possessing a right as such was intrinsically absurd. All rights are
consequences attached to filling some situation of fact. A right which
may be acquired by possession differs from others simply in being attached to a situation
of such a nature that it may be filled successively
by different persons, or by any one without regard to the lawfulness
of his doing so, as is the case where the situation consists in having a
tangible object within one’s power.
When a right of this sort is recognized by the law, there is no difficulty in transferring it;
or, more accurately, there is no difficulty in
different persons successively enjoying similar rights in respect of the
subject-matter. If A, being the possessor of a horse or a field, gives up
the possession to B, the rights which B acquires stand on the same
ground as A’s did before. The facts from which A’s rights sprang have
ceased to be true of A, and are now true of B. The consequences at- (Page 306).
tached by the law to those facts now exist for B, as they did for A before. The situation of
fact from which the rights spring is a continuing one, and any one who occupies it, no
matter how, has the right
attached to it.
But there is no possession possible of a contract. The fact that a
consideration was given yesterday by A to B, and a promise received
 in return, cannot be laid hold of by X, and transferred from A to himself. The only thing
which can be transferred is the benefit or burden
of the promise, and how can they be separated from the facts which
gave rise to them? How, in short, can a man sue or be sued on a promise in which he had
no part?
Hitherto it has been assumed, in dealing with any special right or
obligation, that the facts from which it sprung were true of the individual entitled or
bound. But it often happens, especially in modern
law, that a person acquires and is allowed to enforce a special right,
although the facts which give rise to it are not true of him, or are true
of him only in part. One of the chief problems of the law is to explain
the machinery by which this result has been brought to pass. (Page 307).

It will be observed that the problem is not coextensive with the

whole field of rights. Some rights cannot be transferred by any device
or contrivance; for instance, a man’s right to bodily safety or reputation. Others again are
incident to possession, and within the limits
of that conception no other is necessary. As Savigny said, “Succession
does not apply to possession by itself.”
1
But the notion of possession will carry us but a very little way in
our understanding of the modern theory of transfer. That theory depends very largely
upon the notion of succession, to use the word just
quoted from Savigny, and accordingly successions will be the subject
of this and the following Lecture. I shall begin by explaining the the- (Page 307).
ory of succession to persons deceased, and after that is done I shall
pass to the theory of transfer between living people, and shall consider whether any
relation can be established between the two.
The former is easily shown to be founded upon a fictitious identification between the
deceased and his successor. And as a first step to
the further discussion, as well as for its own sake, I shall briefly state
the evidence touching the executor, the heir, and the devisee. In order
to understand the theory of our law with regard to the first of these,
at least, scholars are agreed that it is necessary to consider the structure and position of
the Roman family as it was in the infancy of Roman society. (Page 308).

In Roman law, if brat of brain analog were to hold—the text should own the author, not
th other way around: Heirs are called sui heredes, that is, heirs of themselves or of their
own
property, as is explained by Gaius.
2
Paulus says that they are regarded
as owners in a certain sense, even in the lifetime of their father, and
that after his death they do not so much receive an inheritance as obtain the full power of
dealing with their property.
3 (Page 308).
Starting from this point it is easy to understand the succession of
heirs to a deceased paterfamilias in the Roman system. If the family
was the owner of the property administered by a paterfamilias, its (Page 308).

head. The
family continued, although the head died. And when, probably by a
gradual change,
4
the paterfamilias came to be regarded as owner, instead of a simple manager of the
family rights, the nature and continuity of those rights did not change with the title to
them. The familia continued to the heirs as it was left by the ancestor. The heir
succeeded not to the ownership of this or that thing separately, but to
the total hereditas or leadership of the family with certain rights of
property as incident,
5
and of course he took this headship, or right of
representing the family interests, subject to the modifications effected
by the last manager.
The aggregate of the ancestor’s rights and duties, or, to use the
technical phrase, the total persona sustained by him, was easily separated from his
natural personality. For this persona was but the aggregate of what had formerly been
family rights and duties, and was
originally sustained by any individual only as the family head. Hence
it was said to be continued by the inheritance,
6
and when the heir
assumed it he had his action in respect of injuries previously (Page 309).
committed.
7
Thus the Roman heir came to be treated as identified with his ancestor for the purposes
of the law. And thus it is clear how the impossible transfers which I seek to explain were
accomplished in that instance. Rights to which B as B could show no title, he could
readily (Page 309).

maintain under the fiction that he was the same person as A, whose
title was not denied.
It is not necessary at this point to study family rights in the German tribes. For it is not
disputed that the modern executor derives
his characteristics from the Roman heir. Wills also were borrowed
from Rome, and were unknown to the Germans of Tacitus.
8
Administrators were a later imitation of executors, introduced by statute for
cases where there was no will, or where, for any other reason, executors were wanting.
 The executor has the legal title to the whole of the testator’s personal estate, and,
generally speaking, the power of alienation. Formerly he was entitled to the undistributed
residue, not, it may fairly
be conjectured, as legatee of those specific chattels, but because he
represented the person of the testator, and therefore had all the rights
which the testator would have had after distribution if alive. The residue is nowadays
generally bequeathed by the will, but it is not even
now regarded as a specific gift of the chattels remaining undisposed
of, (Page 310).

No such rule has governed residuary devises of real estate, which

have always been held to be specific in England down to the present
day. So that, if a devise of land should fail, that land would not be disposed of by the
residuary clause, but would descend to the heir as if
there had been no will.
Again, the appointment of an executor relates back to the date of
the testator’s death. The continuity of person is preserved by this fiction, as in Rome it
was by personifying the inheritance ad interim.
Enough has been said to show the likeness between our executor
and the Roman heir. And bearing in mind what was said about the (Page 310).

Executors and administrators afford the chief, if not the only, example of universal
succession in the English law. But although they
succeed per universitatem, as has been explained, they do not succeed
to all kinds of property. The personal estate goes to them, but land
takes another course. All real estate not disposed of by will goes to the
heir, and the rules of inheritance are quite distinct from those which
govern the distribution of chattels. Accordingly, the question arises
whether the English heir or successor to real estate presents the same
analogies to the Roman heres as the executor. (Page 311).

The English heir is not a universal successor. Each and every parcel of land descends as a
separate and specific thing. Nevertheless, in
his narrower sphere he unquestionably represents the person of his
ancestor. Different opinions have been held as to whether the same
thing was true in early German law. Dr. Laband says that it was;
11
Sohm takes the opposite view.
12
It is commonly supposed that family ownership, at least of land, came before that of
individuals in the
German tribes, and it has been shown how naturally representation
followed from a similar state of things in Rome. But it is needless to
consider whether our law on this subject is of German or Roman origin, as the principle
of identification has clearly prevailed from the
 time of Glanvill to the present day. If it was not known to the Germans, it is plainly
accounted for by the influence of the Roman law. If
there was anything of the sort in the Salic law, it was no doubt due
to natural causes similar to those which gave rise to the principle at
Rome. (Page 312).
As late as Bracton, two centuries after the Norman conquest, the
heir was not the successor to lands alone, but represented his ancestor
in a much more general sense, as will be seen directly. The office of
executor, in the sense of heir, was unknown to the Anglo-Saxons,
14
and even in Bracton’s time does not seem to have been what it has (Page 312).

since become. There is, therefore, no need to go back further than to

the early Norman period, after the appointment of executors had become common, and
the heir was more nearly what he is now.
When Glanvill wrote, a little more than a century after the Conquest, the heir was bound
to warrant the reasonable gifts of his ancestor to the grantees and their heirs;
15
and if the effects of the ancestor
were insufficient to pay his debts, the heir was bound to make up the
deficiency from his own property.
16
Neither Glanvill nor his Scotch
imitator, the Regiam Majestatem,
17
limits the liability to the amount
of property inherited from the same source. This makes the identification of heir and
ancestor as complete as that of the Roman law
before such a limitation was introduced by Justinian. On the other
hand, a century later, it distinctly appears from Bracton,
18
that the
heir was only bound so far as property had descended to him, and in
the early sources of the Continent, Norman as well as other, the same
limitation appears.
19
The liabilities of the heir were probably shrinking. Britton and Fleta, (Page 313).
The liabilities of the heir were probably shrinking. Britton and Fleta, the imitators of
Bracton, and perhaps Bracton
himself, say that an heir is not bound to pay his ancestor’s debt, unless
he be thereto especially bound by the deed of his ancestor.
20
The later
law required that the heir should be mentioned if he was to be held.
But at all events the identification of heir and ancestor still approached the nature of a
universal succession in the time of Bracton,
as is shown by another statement of his. He asks if the testator can
bequeath his rights of action, and answers, No, so far as concerns
debts not proved and recovered in the testator’s life. But actions of (Page 313).

that sort belong to the heirs, and must be sued in the secular court;
for before they are so recovered in the proper court, the executor cannot proceed for
them in the ecclesiastical tribunal.
21
This shows that the identification worked both ways. The heir was
liable for the debts due from his ancestor, and he could recover those
which were due to him, until the executor took his place in the King’s
Courts, as well as in those of the Church. Within the limits just explained the heir was
also bound to warrant property sold by his ancestor to the purchaser and his heirs.
22
It is not necessary, after this
evidence that the modern heir began by representing his ancestor
generally, to seek for expressions in later books, since his position has
been limited. But just as we have seen that the executor is still said to
represent the person of his testator, the heir was said to represent the
person of his ancestor in the time of Edward I.
23
So, at a much later
date, it was said that “the heir is in representation in point of taking
by inheritance eadem persona cum antecessore,”
24
the same persona as
his ancestor. (Page 314).

A great judge, who died but a few years ago, repeats language which
would have been equally familiar to the lawyers of Edward or of
James. Baron Parke, after laying down that in general a party is not
required to make profert of an instrument to the possession of which (Page 314).

he is not entitled, says that there is an exception “in the cases of heir
and executor, who may plead a release to the ancestor or testator
whom they respectively represent; so also with respect to several tortfeasors, for in all
these cases there is a privity between the parties
which constitutes an identity of person.”
25
But this is not all. The identity of person was carried farther still. If
a man died leaving male children, and owning land in fee, it went to
the oldest son alone; but, if he left only daughters, it descended to
them all equally. In this case several individuals together continued
the persona of their ancestor. But it was always laid down that they
were but one heir.
26
 For the purpose of working out this result, not
only was one person identified with another, but several persons were
reduced to one, that they might sustain a single persona.
What was the persona? It was not the sum of all the rights and duties of the ancestor. It
has been seen that for many centuries his general status, the sum of all his rights and
duties except those connected
with real property, has been taken up by the executor or administrator. The persona
continued by (Page 315).

administrator. The persona continued by the heir was from an early day confined
to real estate in its technical sense; that is, to property subject to feudal principles, as
distinguished from chattels, which, as Blackstone
tells us,
27
include whatever was not a feud.
But the heir’s persona was not even the sum of all the ancestor’s
rights and duties in connection with real estate. It has been said already that every fee
descends specifically, and not as incident to a
larger universitas. This appears not so much from the fact that the (Page 315).

rules of descent governing different parcels might be different,

28
so
that the same person would not be heir to both, as from the very nature of feudal
property. Under the feudal system in its vigor, the holding of land was only one incident
of a complex personal relation. The
land was forfeited for a failure to render the services for which it was
granted; the service could be renounced for a breach of correlative
duties on the part of the lord.
29
It rather seems that, in the beginning
of the feudal period under Charlemagne, a man could only hold land
of one lord.
30
Even when it had become common to hold of more
than one, the strict personal relation was only modified so far as to
save the tenant from having to perform inconsistent services. Glanvill
and Bracton
31
tell us that a tenant holding of several lords was to do
homage for each fee, but to reserve his allegiance for the lord of whom
he held his chief estate; but that, if the different lords should make
war upon each other, and the chief lord should command the tenant
to accompany him in person, the tenant ought to obey, saving the service due to the other
lord for the fee held of him. (Page 316).
We see, then, that the tenant had a distinct persona or status in respect of each of the fees
which he held. The rights and duties incident
to one of them had no relation to the rights and duties incident to
another. A succession to one had no connection with the succession
to another. Each succession was the assumption of a distinct personal
relation, in which the successor was to be determined by the terms of
the relation in question.
The persona which we are seeking to define is the estate. Every fee
is a distinct persona, a distinct hereditas, or inheritance, as it has been (Page 316).

called since the time of Bracton. We have already seen that it may be
sustained by more than one where there are several heirs, as well as by
one, just as a corporation may have more or less members. But not
only may it be divided lengthwise, so to speak, among persons interested in the same
way at the same time: it may also be cut across into
successive interests, to be enjoyed one after another. In technical language, it may be
divided into a particular estate and remainders. But
they are all parts of the same fee, and the same fiction still governs
them. We read in an old case that “he in reversion and particular tenant are but one
tenant.”
32
This is only a statement of counsel, to be
sure; but it is made to account for a doctrine which seems to need the
explanation, to the effect that, after the death of the tenant for life, he
in reversion might have error or attaint on an erroneous judgment or
false verdict given against the tenant for life.
33
To sum up the results so far, the heir of modern English law gets
his characteristic features from the law as it stood soon after the Conquest. (Page 317).

Many of his functions as such were soon transferred to the executor.

The heir’s rights became confined to real estate, and his liabilities to
those connected with real estate, and to obligations of his ancestor
expressly binding him. The succession to each fee or feudal inheritance is distinct, not
part of the sum of all the ancestor’s rights regarded as one whole. But to this day the
executor in his sphere, and
the heir in his, represent the person of the deceased, and are treated as
if they were one with him, for the purpose of settling their rights and
obligations.
The bearing which this has upon the contracts of the deceased has
been pointed out. But its influence is not confined to contract; it runs (Page 317).

through everything. The most striking instance, however, is the acquisition of prescriptive
rights. Take the case of a right of way. A right
of way over a neighbor’s land can only be acquired by grant, or by using it adversely for
twenty years. A man uses a way for ten years, and
 dies. Then his heir uses it ten years. Has any right been acquired? If
common sense alone is consulted, the answer must be no. The ancestor did not get any
right, because he did not use the way long enough.
And just as little did the heir. How can it better the heir’s title that
another man had trespassed before him? Clearly, if four strangers to
each other used the way for five years each, no right would be acquired by the last. But
here comes in the fiction which has been so
carefully explained. From the point of view of the law it is not two
persons who have used the way for ten years each, but one who has
used it for twenty. The heir has the advantage of sustaining his ancestor’s persona, and
the right is acquired. (Page 318).

I now reach the most difficult and obscure part of the subject. It
remains to be discovered whether the fiction of identity was extended
to others besides the heir and executor. And if we find, as we do, that
it went but little farther in express terms, the question will still arise
whether the mode of thought and the conceptions made possible by
the doctrine of inheritance have not silently modified the law as to
dealings between the living. It seems to me demonstrable that their
influence has been profound, and that, without understanding the
theory of inheritance, it is impossible to understand the theory of
transfer inter vivos.
The difficulty in dealing with the subject is to convince the sceptic
that there is anything to explain. Nowadays, the notion that a right is
valuable is almost identical with the notion that it may be turned into
money by selling it. But it was not always so. Before you can sell a
right, you must be able to make a sale thinkable in legal terms. I put
the case of the transfer of a contract at the beginning of the Lecture. (Page 318).

A way, until
it becomes a right of way, is just as little susceptible of being held by a
possessory title as a contract. If then a contract can be sold, if a buyer
can add the time of his seller’s adverse user to his own, what is the
machinery by which the law works out the result?
The most superficial acquaintance with any system of law in its
earlier stages will show with what difficulty and by what slow degrees
such machinery has been provided, and how the want of it has restricted the sphere of
alienation. It is a great mistake to assume that it
is a mere matter of common sense that the buyer steps into the shoes
of the seller, according to our significant metaphor. Suppose that sales
and other civil transfers had kept the form of warlike capture which it
seems that they had in the infancy of Roman law,
34
and which was at
least partially retained in one instance, the acquisition of wives, after
 the transaction had, in fact, taken the more civilized shape of purchase. The notion that
the buyer came in adversely to the seller would
probably have accompanied the fiction of adverse taking, and he
would have stood on his own position as founding a new title. (Page 319).
Without the aid of conceptions derived from some other source, it would
have been hard to work out a legal transfer of objects which did not
admit of possession. (Page 319).

34. In the American Law Review for October, 1872, VII. 49, 50, I mentioned one or
two indications of this fact. But I have since had the satisfaction of finding it worked
out with such detail and learning in Ihering’s Geist des Römischen Rechts, §§ 10, 48,
that I cannot do better than refer to that work, only adding that for my purposes it is
not necessary to go so far as Ihering, and that he does not seem to have been led to the
conclusions which it is my object to establish. See, further, Clark, Early Roman Law,
109, 110; Laferrière, Hist. du Droit Franç., I. 114 et seq.; D. 1. 5. 4, § 3; Gaii Inst. IV. §
16;
ib. II. § 69. (Page 319).

A possible source of such other conceptions was to be found in

family law. The principles of inheritance furnished a fiction and a
mode of thought which at least might have been extended into other
spheres. In order to prove that they were in fact so extended, it will be
necessary to examine once more the law of Rome, as well as the remains of German and
Anglo-Saxon customs.
I will take up first the German and Anglo-Saxon laws which are the
ancestors of our own on one side of the house. For although what we
get from those sources is not in the direct line of the argument, it lays
a foundation for it by showing the course of development in different
fields. (Page 320).

The obvious analogy between purchaser and heir seems to have

been used in the folk-laws, but mainly for another purpose than those
which will have to be considered in the English law. This was to enlarge the sphere of
alienability. It will be remembered that there are
many traces of family ownership in early German, as well as in early
Roman law; and it would seem that the transfer of property which
originally could not be given outside the family, was worked out
through the form of making the grantee an heir.
The history of language points to this conclusion. Heres, as Beseler
35
and others have remarked, from meaning a successor to the
property of a person deceased, was extended to the donee mortis
causa, and even more broadly to grantees in general. Hereditare was
used in like manner for the transfer of land. Hévin is quoted by Laferrière
36
as calling attention to the fact that the ancient usage was to say
hériter for purchase, héritier for purchaser, and déshériter for sell.
The texts of the Salic law give us incontrovertible evidence. A man
might transfer the whole or any part of his property
37
by delivering (Page 320).

possession of it to a trustee who, within twelve months, handed it

over to the beneficiaries.
38
To those, the text reads, whom the donor
has named heredes (quos heredes appellavit). Here then was a voluntary transfer of more
or less property at pleasure to persons freely
chosen, who were not necessarily universal successors, if they ever
were, and who nevertheless took under the name heredes. The word,
which must have meant at first persons taking by descent, was extended to persons
taking by purchase.
39
If the word became enlarged
in meaning, it is probably because the thought which it conveyed was
turned to new uses. The transaction seems to have fallen half-way between the institution
of an heir and a sale. The later law of the Ripuarian Franks treats it more distinctly from
the former point of view. It
permits a man who has no sons to give all his property to whomsoever he chooses,
whether relatives or strangers, as inheritance, either
by way of adfathamire, as the Salic form was called, or by writing or
delivery.
40 (Page 321).
The Lombards had a similar transfer, in which the donee was not
only called heres, but was made liable like an heir for the debts of the
donor on receiving the property after the donor’s death.
41
By the Salic (Page 321).
law a man who could not pay the wergeld was allowed to transfer formally his house-lot,
and with it the liability. But the transfer was to
the next of kin.
42
The house-lot or family curtilage at first developed strictly within
the limits of the family. Here again, at least in England, freedom of
alienation seems to have grown up by a gradually increased latitude
in the choice of successors. If we may trust the order of development
to be noticed in the early charters, which it is hard to believe accidental, although the
charters are few, royal grants at first permitted an
election of heirs among the kindred, and then extended it beyond
them. In a deed of the year 679, the language is, “as it is granted so do
you hold it and your posterity.” One a century later reads, “which let
him always possess, and after his death leave to which of his heirs
 he will.” Another, “and after him with free power (of choice) leave to
the man of his kin to whom he wishes to” (leave it). A somewhat earlier charter of 736
goes a step further: “So that as long as he lives he
shall have the power of holding and possessing (and) of leaving it
to whomsoever he choose, either in his lifetime, (Page 322).

he choose, either in his lifetime, or certainly after

his death.” At the beginning of the ninth century the donee has power
to leave the property to whomsoever he will, or, in still broader terms,
to exchange or grant in his lifetime, and after his death to leave it to
whom he chooses,—or to sell, exchange, and leave to whatsoever heir
he chooses.
43
This choice of heirs recalls the quos heredes appellavit (Page 322).
the Salic law just mentioned, and may be compared with the language
of a Norman charter of about the year 1190: “To W. and his heirs, to
wit those whom he may constitute his heirs.”
44 (Page 323).
I now turn from the German to the Roman sources. These have
the closest connection with the argument, because much of the doctrine to be found there
has been transplanted unchanged into modern law.
The early Roman law only recognized as relatives those who would
have been members of the same patriarchal family, and under the
same patriarchal authority, had the common ancestor survived. As
wives passed into the families of their husbands, and lost all connection with that in
which they were born, relationship through females
was altogether excluded. The heir was one who traced his relationship
to the deceased through males alone. With the advance of civilization
this rule was changed. The prætor gave the benefits of the inheritance
to the blood relations, although they were not heirs, and could not
be admitted to the succession according to the ancient law.
46
But the
change was not brought about by repealing the old law, which still (Page 324).

The new principle was

accommodated to the old forms by a fiction. The blood relation could
sue on the fiction that he was an heir, although he was not one in
fact.
47
One of the early forms of instituting an heir was a sale of the familia or headship of the
family to the intended heir, with all its rights
and duties.
48
 This sale of the universitas was afterwards extended beyond the case of inheritance to
that of bankruptcy, when it was desired to put the bankrupt’s property into the hands of a
trustee for
distribution. This trustee also could make use of the fiction, and sue
as if he had been the bankrupt’s heir.
49
We are told by one of the great
jurisconsults that in general universal successors stand in the place of
heirs.
50
The Roman heir, with one or two exceptions, was always a universal successor; and the
fiction of heirship, as such, could hardly be
used with propriety except to enlarge the sphere of universal successions. So far as it
extended, however, all the consequences attached to
the original fiction of identity between heir and ancestor (Page 325).

The Roman heir, with one or two exceptions, was always a universal successor; and the
fiction of heirship, as such, could hardly be
used with propriety except to enlarge the sphere of universal successions. So far as it
extended, however, all the consequences attached to
the original fiction of identity between heir and ancestor followed as
of course.
To recur to the case of rights acquired by prescription, every universal successor could
add the time of his predecessor’s adverse use to
his own in order to make out the right. There was no addition, legally
speaking, but one continuous possession. (Page 325).

The express fiction of inheritance perhaps stopped here. But when

a similar joinder of times was allowed between a legatee or devisee
(legatarius) and his testator, the same explanation was offered. It was
said, that, when a specific thing was left to a person by will, so far as
concerned having the benefit of the time during which the testator
had been in possession for the purpose of acquiring a title, the legatee
was in a certain sense quasi an heir.
51

Yet a legatarius was not a universal successor, and for most purposes stood in marked
contrast with such successors.
52 (Page 326).

Thus the strict law of inheritance had made the notion familiar
that one man might have the advantage of a position filled by another, although it was
not filled, or was only partially filled, by himself; and the second fiction, by which the
privileges of a legal heir in
this respect as well as others had been extended to other persons,
broke down the walls which might otherwise have confined those
privileges to a single case. A new conception was introduced into the
law, and there was nothing to hinder its further application. As has
been shown, it was applied in terms to a sale of the universitas for
business purposes, and to at least one case where the succession was
confined to a single specific thing. Why, then, might not every gift or
sale be regarded as a succession, so far as to insure the same advantages?
The joinder of times to make out a title was soon allowed between
buyer and seller, and I have no doubt, from the language always used
by the Roman lawyers, that it was arrived at in the way I have suggested. (Page 326).

The joinder of times to make out a title was soon allowed between
buyer and seller, and I have no doubt, from the language always used
by the Roman lawyers, that it was arrived at in the way I have suggested. A passage from
Scævola (b.c. 30) will furnish sufficient proof.
Joinder of possessions, he says, that is, the right to add the time of
one’s predecessor’s holding to one’s own, clearly belongs to those who
succeed to the place of others, whether by contract or by will: for heirs (Page 326).

and those who are treated as holding the place of successors are allowed to add their
testator’s possession to their own. Accordingly, if
you sell me a slave I shall have the benefit of your holding.
53
The joinder of times is given to those who succeed to the place of
another. Ulpian cites a like phrase from a jurisconsult of the time of
the Antonines,—“to whose place I have succeeded by inheritance, or
purchase, or any other right.”
54
Succedere in locum aliorum, like sustinere personam, is an expression of the Roman
lawyers for those continuations of one man’s legal position by another of which the type
was the succession of heir to ancestor. Succedere alone is used in the
sense of “inherit,”
55
and successio in that of “inheritance.”
56
The succession par excellence was the inheritance; and it is believed that
scarcely any instance will be found in the Roman sources where “succession” does not
convey that analogy, and indicate the partial assumption, at least, of a persona formerly
sustained by another. It
clearly does so in the passage before us. (Page 327).

And I may add, by way of further explanation, that every relation of juridical succession
presupposes either an inheritance or a
relation to which, so far as it extends, the analogies of the inheritance
may be applied. (Page 328).

the successor, whether

by inheritance, purchase, or any other right.
63
The formal oath of a
party to an action was conclusive in favor of his successors, universal
or singular.
64
Successors by purchase or gift had the benefit of agreements made with the vendor.
65
A multitude of general expressions
show that for most purposes, whether of action or defence, the buyer
stood in the shoes of the seller, to use the metaphor of our own law.
66
And what is more important than the result, which often might have
been reached by other ways, the language and analogies are drawn
throughout from the succession to the inheritance.
Thus understood, there could not have been a succession between
a person dispossessed of a thing against his will and the wrongful
possessor. Without the element of consent there is no room for the (Page 329).

The argument now returns to the English law, fortified with some
general conclusions. It has been shown that in both the systems from
whose union our law arose the rules governing conveyance, or the
transfer of specific objects between living persons, were deeply affected by notions
drawn from inheritance. It had been shown previously that in England the principles of
inheritance applied directly to
the singular succession of the heir to a specific fee, as well as to the
universal succession of the executor. It would be remarkable, considering their history, if
the same principles had not affected other singular successions also. It will soon appear
that they have. And not to
be too careful about the order of proof, I will first take up the joinder
of times in prescription, as that has just been so fully discussed. The
English law of the subject is found on examination to be the same as
the Roman in extent, reason, and expression. It is indeed largely copied from that source.
(Page 330).

The
English law of the subject is found on examination to be the same as
the Roman in extent, reason, and expression. It is indeed largely copied from that source.
For servitudes, such as rights of way, light, and
the like, form the chief class of prescriptive rights, and our law of servitudes is mainly
Roman. Prescriptions, it is said, “are properly personal, and therefore are always alleged
in the person of him who prescribes, viz. that he and all those whose estate he hath, &c.;
therefore,
a bishop or a parson may prescribe, . . . for there is a perpetual estate,
 and a perpetual succession, and the successor had the very same estate which his
predecessor had, for that continues, though the person alters, like the case of the ancestor
and the heir.”
68
So in a modern (Page 330).

case, where by statute twenty years’ dispossession extinguished the

owner’s title, the Court of Queen’s Bench said that probably the right
would be transferred to the possessor “if the same person, or several
persons, claiming one from the other by descent, will or conveyance,
had been in possession for the twenty years.” “But . . . such twenty
years’ possession must be either by the same person, or several persons claiming one
from the other, which is not the case here.”
69
In a word, it is equally clear that the continuous possession of privies in title, or, in
Roman phrase, successors, has all the effect of the
continuous possession of one, and that such an effect is not attributed
to the continuous possession of different persons who are not in the
same chain of title. One who dispossesses another of land cannot add
the time during which his disseisee has used a way to the period of his
own use, while one who purchased can.
70
The authorities which have been quoted make it plain that the English law proceeds on
the same theory as the Roman. (Page 331).

One who buys

land of another gets the very same estate which his seller had. He is in
of the same fee, or hereditas, which means, as I have shown, that he
sustains the same persona. On the other hand, one who wrongfully
dispossesses another,—a disseisor,—gets a different estate, is in of a
new fee, although the land is the same; and much technical reasoning
is based upon this doctrine. (Page 331).

Successions: II. Inter Vivos

T
h e p r i n c i p a l contracts known to the common law and
suable in the King’s Courts, a century after the Conquest, were
suretyship and debt. The heir, as the general representative of his ancestor’s rights and
obligations, was liable for his debts, and was the
proper person to sue for those which were due the estate. By the time
of Edward III. this had changed. Debts had ceased to concern the heir
except secondarily. The executor took his place both for collection
and payment. It is said that even when the heir was bound he could
not be sued except in case the executor had no assets. (Page 334).

But there was another ancient obligation which had a different

 history. I refer to the warranty which arose upon the transfer of property. We should call
it a contract, but it probably presented itself to
the mind of Glanvill’s predecessors simply as a duty or obligation at- (Page 334).

tached by law to a transaction which was directed to a different point;

just as the liability of a bailee, which is now treated as arising from his
undertaking, was originally raised by the law out of the position in
which he stood toward third persons.
After the Conquest we do not hear much of warranty, except in
connection with land, and this fact will at once account for its having
had a different history from debt. The obligation of warranty was to
defend the title, and, if the defence failed, to give to the evicted owner
other land of equal value. If an ancestor had conveyed lands with
warranty, this obligation could not be fulfilled by his executor, but
only by his heir, to whom his other lands had descended. Conversely
as to the benefit of warranties made to a deceased grantee, his heir
was the only person interested to enforce such warranties, because
the land descended to him. Thus the heir continued to represent his
ancestor in the latter’s rights and obligations by way of warranty, after
the executor had relieved him of the debts, just as before that time he
had represented his ancestor in all respects. (Page 335).

If a man was sued for property which he had bought from another,
the regular course of litigation was for the defendant to summon in
his seller to take charge of the defence, and for him, in turn, to summon in his, if he had
one, and so on until a party was reached in the
chain of title who finally took the burden of the case upon himself. A
contrast which was early stated between the Lombard and the Roman
law existed equally between the Anglo-Saxon and the Roman. It was
said that the Lombard presents his grantor, the Roman stands in his
grantor’s shoes,—Langobardus dat auctorem, Romanus stat loco auctoris.
2
Suppose, now, that A gave land to B, and B conveyed over to C. If C
was sued by D, claiming a better title, C practically got the benefit of (Page 335).

Another rule on which there are vast stores of forgotten learning

will show how exactly the fiction fell in with the earlier law. Only
those who were privy in estate with the person to whom the warranty
was originally given, could vouch the original warrantor. Looking
back to the early procedure, it will be seen that of course only those in
the same chain of title could even mediately get the benefit of a former owner’s
warranty. The ground on which a man was bound to
warrant was that he had conveyed the property to the person who
summoned him. Hence a man could summon no one but his grantor,
and the successive vouchers came to an end when the last vouchee
could not call on another from whom he had bought. Now when the
process was abridged, no persons were made liable to summons who
would not have been liable before. The present owner was allowed (Page 338).

to vouch directly those who otherwise would have been indirectly

bound to defend his title, but no others. Hence he could only summon those from whom
his grantor derived his title. But this was
equally well expressed in terms of the fiction employed. In order to
vouch, the present owner must have the estate of the person to whom
the warranty was made. As every lawyer knows, the estate does not
mean the land. It means the status or persona in regard to that land
formerly sustained by another. The same word was used in alleging a
right by prescription, “that he and those whose estate he hath have for
time whereof memory runneth not to the contrary,” &c.; and it will
be remembered that the word corresponds to the same requirement
of succession there.
To return to Bracton, it must be understood that the description of
assigns as quasi heredes is not accidental. He describes them in that
way whenever he has occasion to speak of them. He even pushes the
reasoning drawn from the analogy of inheritance to extremes, and
refers to it in countless passages. (Page 339).

The importance of this circumstance lies in the working of the law

of warranty upon other covenants which took its place. When the old
actions for land gave way to more modern and speedier forms, warrantors were no
longer vouched in to defend, and if a grantee was (Page 340).

assignment to the plaintiff.

17
The only point remaining to make the analogy between covenants
for title and warranty complete was to require assigns to be mentioned in order to enable
them to sue. In modern times, of course,
such a requirement, if it should exist, would be purely formal, and
would be of no importance except as an ear-mark by which to trace
the history of a doctrine. It would aid our studies if we could say that
wherever assigns are to get the benefit of a covenant as privies in estate with the
covenantee, they must be mentioned in the covenant. (Page 342).

Whether such a requirement does exist or not would be hard to tell

from the decisions alone. It is commonly supposed not to. But the
popular opinion on this trifling point springs from a failure to understand one of the great
antinomies of the law, which must now be explained.
So far as we have gone, we have found that, wherever one party
steps into the rights or obligations of another, without in turn filling
the situation of fact of which those rights or obligations are the legal
 consequences, the substitution is explained by a fictitious identification of the two
individuals, which is derived from the analogy of
the inheritance. This identification has been seen as it has been consciously worked out
in the creation of the executor, whose entire status is governed by it. It has been seen still
consciously applied in the
narrower sphere of the heir. It has been found hidden at the root of
the relation between buyer and seller in two cases at least, prescription and warranty,
when the history of that relation is opened to a
sufficient depth. (Page 343).

This rule of law does not stand on a succession between

the wrongful possessor and the owner, which is out of the question.
Neither can it be defended on the same ground as the protection to
the occupation of the land itself. That ground is that the law defends
possession against everything except a better title. But, as has been
said before, the common law does not recognize possession of a way.
A man who has used a way ten years without title cannot sue even a
stranger for stopping it. He was a trespasser at the beginning, he is
nothing but a trespasser still. There must exist a right against the servient owner before
there is a right against anybody else. At the same
time it is clear that a way is no more capable of possession because
somebody else has a right to it, than if no one had. (Page 344).

How comes it, then, that one who has neither title nor possession
is so far favored? The answer is to be found, not in reasoning, but in a
failure to reason. In the first Lecture of this course the thought with
which we have to deal was shown in its theological stage, to borrow
Comte’s well-known phraseology, as where an axe was made the object of criminal
process; and also in the metaphysical stage, where the
language of personification alone survived, but survived to cause
confusion of reasoning. The case put seems to be an illustration of
the latter. The language of the law of easements was built up out of
similes drawn from persons at a time when the noxæ deditio was still
familiar; and then, as often happens, language reacted upon thought,
so that conclusions were drawn as to the rights themselves from the
terms in which they happened to be expressed. When one estate was
said to be enslaved to another, or a right of way was said to be a quality or incident of a
neighboring piece of land, men’s minds were not
alert to see that these phrases were only so many personifying metaphors, which
explained nothing unless the figure of speech was true.
Rogron deduced the negative nature of servitudes from the rule (Page 344).

that the land owes the services, not the person,—Prædium non persona servit. For, said
Rogron, the land alone being bound, it can only
be bound passively. Austin called this an “absurd remark.”
18
 But the
jurists from whom we have inherited our law of easements were contented with no better
reasoning. Papinian himself wrote that servitudes cannot be partially extinguished,
because they are due from
lands, not persons.
19
Celsus thus decides the case which I took for my
illustration: Even if possession of a dominant estate is acquired by
forcibly ejecting the owner, the way will be retained; since the estate is
possessed in such quality and condition as it is when taken.
20
The
commentator Godefroi tersely adds that there are two such conditions, slavery and
freedom; and his antithesis is as old as Cicero.
21
So,
in another passage, Celsus asks, What else are the rights attaching to
land but qualities of that land?
22
So Justinian’s Institutes speak of servitudes which inhere in buildings.
23
So Paulus speaks of such rights as
being accessory to bodies. “And thus,” adds Godefroi, “rights may belong to inanimate
things.”
24
It easily followed from all this that a sale
of the dominant estate carried existing (Page 345).
existing easements, not because the
buyer succeeded to the place of the seller, but because land is bound
to land.
25 (Page 345).

All these figures import that land is capable of having rights, as

Austin recognizes. Indeed, he even says that the land “is erected into a
legal or fictitious person, and is styled ‘prædium dominans.’”
26
But if
this means anything more than to explain what is implied by the
Roman metaphors, it goes too far. The dominant estate was never
“erected into a legal person,” either by conscious fiction or as a result
of primitive beliefs.
27
It could not sue or be sued, like a ship in the
admiralty. It is not supposed that its possessor could maintain an action for an
interference with an easement before his time, as an heir
could for an injury to property of the hereditas jacens. If land had
 even been systematically treated as capable of acquiring rights, the
time of a disseisee might have been added to that of the wrongful occupant, on the
ground that the land, and not this or that individual,
was gaining the easement, and that long association between the enjoyment of the
privilege and the land was sufficient, which has never
been the law. (Page 346).
All that can be said is, that the metaphors and similes employed
naturally led to the rule which has prevailed, and that, as this rule was
just as good as any other, or at least was unobjectionable, it was drawn
from the figures of speech without attracting attention, and before
any one had seen that they were only figures, which proved nothing
and justified no conclusion.
As easements were said to belong to the dominant estate, it followed that whoever
possessed the land had a right of the same degree
over what was incidental to it. If the true meaning had been that a
way or other easement admits of possession, and is taken possession of with the land to
which it runs, and that its enjoyment is protected on the same grounds as possession in
other cases, the thought (Page 346).

could have been understood. But that was not the meaning of the
Roman law, and, as has been shown, it is not the doctrine of ours.
We must take it that easements have become an incident of land by
an unconscious and unreasoned assumption that a piece of land can
have rights. It need not be said that this is absurd, although the rules
of law which are based upon it are not so.
Absurd or not, the similes as well as the principles of the Roman
law reappear in Bracton. He says, “The servitude by which land is
subjected to [other] land, is made on the likeness of that by which
man is made the slave of man.”
28
“For rights belong to a free tenement, as well as tangible things. . . . They may be called
rights or liberties with regard to the tenements to which they are owed, but servitudes
with regard to the tenements by which they are owed. . . . One
estate is free, the other subjected to slavery.”
29
“[A servitude] may be
called an arrangement by which house is subjected to house, farm to
farm, holding to holding.”
30 (Page 347).
No passage has met my eye in which
Bracton expressly decides that an easement goes with the dominant
estate upon a disseisin, but what he says leaves little doubt that he followed the Roman
law in this as in other things.
The writ against a disseisor was for “so much land and its appurtenances,”
31
 which must mean that he who had the land even wrongfully had the appurtenances. So
Bracton says an action is in rem
“whether it is for the principal thing, or for a right which adheres to
the thing, . . . as when one sues for a right of way, . . . since rights of
this sort are all incorporeal things, and are quasi possessed and reside in bodies, and
cannot be got or kept without the bodies in which
they inhere, nor in any way had without the bodies to which they be- (Page 347).

long.”
32
And again, “Since rights do not admit of delivery, but are
transferred with the thing in which they are, that is, the bodily thing,
he to whom they are transferred forthwith has a quasi possession of
those rights as soon as he has the body in which they are.”
33
There is no doubt about the later law, as has been said at the
outset.
We have thus traced two competing and mutually inconsistent
principles into our law. On the one hand is the conception of succession or privity; on the
other, that of rights inhering in a thing. Bracton seems to have vacillated a little from a
feeling of the possibility
of conflict between the two. (Page 348).

There is no doubt about the later law, as has been said at the
outset.
We have thus traced two competing and mutually inconsistent
principles into our law. On the one hand is the conception of succession or privity; on the
other, that of rights inhering in a thing. Bracton seems to have vacillated a little from a
feeling of the possibility
of conflict between the two. The benefit of a warranty was confined
to those who, by the act and consent of the grantee, succeeded to
his place. It did not pass to assigns unless assigns were mentioned.
Bracton supposes grants of easements with or without mention of
assigns, which looks as if he thought the difference might be material
with regard to easements also. He further says, that if an easement be
granted to A, his heirs and assigns, all such by the form of the grant
are allowed the use in succession, and all others are wholly excluded.
34
But he is not speaking of what the rights of a disseisor would be as
against one not having a better title, and he immediately adds that
they are rights over a corporeal object belonging to a corporeal
object. (Page 348).

Although it may be doubted whether the mention of assigns was

ever necessary to attach an easement to land, and although it is very
certain that it did not remain so long, the difficulty referred to grew
greater as time went on. It would have been easily disposed of if the
only rights which could be annexed to land were easements, such as a (Page 348).

right of way. It then might have been said that these were certain limited interests in land,
less than ownership in extent, but like it in kind,
and therefore properly transferred by the same means that ownership was. A right of
way, it might have been argued, is not to be approached from the point of view of
contract. It does not presuppose
any promise on the part of the servient owner. His obligation, although more
troublesome to him than to others, is the same as that
of every one else. It is the purely negative duty not to obstruct or interfere with a right of
property.
35 (Page 349).

But although the test of rights going with the land may have been
something of that nature, this will not help us to understand the cases
without a good deal of explanation. For such rights might exist to active services which
had to be performed by the person who held the
servient estate. It strikes our ear strangely to hear a right to services
from an individual called a right of property as distinguished from
contract. Still this will be found to have been the way in which such
rights were regarded. Bracton argues that it is no wrong to the lord
for the tenant to alienate land held by free and perfect gift, on the
ground that the land is bound and charged with the services into
whose hands soever it may come. The lord is said to have a fee in the
homage and services; and therefore no entry upon the land which
does not disturb them injures him.
36
It is the tenement which imposes
the obligation of homage,
37
and the same thing is true of villein and
other feudal services.
38
The law remained unchanged when feudal services took the form (Page 349).

of rent.
39
Even in our modern terms for years rent is still treated as
something issuing out of the leased premises, so that to this day, although, if you hire a
whole house and it burns down, you have to pay
without abatement, because you have the land out of which the rent
issues, yet if you only hire a suite of rooms and they are burned, you
pay rent no longer, because you no longer have the tenement out of
which it comes.
40
It is obvious that the foregoing reasoning leads to the conclusion
that a disseisor of the tenant would be bound as much as the tenant
himself, and this conclusion was adopted by the early law. The lord
could require the services,
41
or collect the rent
42
of any one who had
the land, because, as was said in language very like Bracton’s, “the
charge of the rent goes with the land.” (Page 350).

Then as to the right to the rent. Rent was treated in early law as a
real right, of which a disseisin was possible, and for which a possessory action could be
brought. If, as was very frequently the case, the
leased land lay within a manor, the rent was parcel of the manor,
44
so
that there was some ground for saying that one who was seised of the
manor, that is, who possessed the lands occupied by the lord of the
manor, and was recognized by the tenants as lord, had the rents as
incident thereto. Thus Brian, Chief Justice of England under Henry
VII., says, “If I am disseised of a manor, and the tenants pay their rent
to the disseisor, and then I re-enter, I shall not have the back rent of
my tenants which they have paid to my disseisor, but the disseisor
shall pay for all in trespass or assize.”
45
This opinion was evidently (Page 350).

founded on the notion that the rent was attached to the chief land
like an easement. Sic fit ut debeantur rei a re.
46
Different principles might have applied when the rent was not parcel of a manor, and
was only part of the reversion; that is, part of the
landlord’s fee or estate out of which the lease was carved. If the lease
and rent were merely internal divisions of that estate, the rent could
not be claimed except by one who was privy to that estate. A disseisor
would get a new and different fee, and would not have the estate of
which the rent was part. And therefore it would seem that in such a
case the tenant could refuse to pay him rent, and that payment to him
would be no defence against the true owner.
47
Nevertheless, if the tenant recognized him, the disseisor would be protected as against
persons who could not show a better title.
48
Furthermore, the rent was so
far annexed to the land that whoever came by the reversion lawfully
could collect it, including the superior lord in case of escheat.
49
Ye t
escheat meant the extinction of the fee of which the lease and rent
were parts, (Page 351).

Services and rent, then, were, and to some extent are still, dealt
with by the law from the point of view of property. They were things
which could be owned and transferred like other property. They
could be possessed even by wrong, and possessory remedies were
given for them.
No such notion was applied to warranties, or to any right which
was regarded wholly from the point of view of contract. And when (Page 351).

we turn to the history of those remedies for rent which sounded in

contract, we find that they were so regarded. The actions of debt and
covenant could not be maintained without privity. In the ninth year
of Henry VI.
50
it was doubted whether an heir having the reversion by
descent could have debt, and it was held that a grantee of the reversion, although he had
the rent, could not have that remedy for it. A
few years later, it was decided that the heir could maintain debt,
51
and
in Henry VII.’s reign the remedy was extended to the devisee,
52
who,
as has been remarked above, seemed more akin to the heir than a
grantee, and was more easily likened to him. It was then logically necessary to give
assigns the same action, and this followed.
53
The privity of contract followed the estate, so that the assignee of the reversion could
sue the person then holding the term.
54
On like grounds
he was afterwards allowed to maintain covenant.
55
But these actions
have never lain for or against persons not privy in estate with the lessor and lessee
respectively, because privity to the contract could never
be worked out without succession to the title. (Page 352).

However, all these niceties had no application to the old freehold

rents of the feudal period, because the contractual remedies did not
apply to them until the time of Queen Anne.
 57
The freehold rent was
just as much real estate as an acre of land, and it was sued for by the
similar remedy of an assize, asking to be put back into possession.
The allowance of contractual remedies shows that rent and feudal
services of that nature, although dealt with as things capable of possession, and looked at
generally from the point of view of property (Page 352).

rather than of contract, yet approach much nearer to the nature of

the latter than a mere duty not to interfere with a way. Other cases
come nearer still. The sphere of prescription and custom in imposing
active duties is large in early law. Sometimes the duty is incident to
the ownership of certain land; sometimes the right is, and sometimes
both are, as in the case of an easement. When the service was for the
benefit of other land, the fact that the burden, in popular language,
fell upon one parcel, was of itself a reason for the benefit attaching to
the other.
Instances of different kinds are these. A parson might be bound by
custom to keep a bull and a boar for the use of his parish.
58
A right
could be attached to a manor by prescription to have a convent sing
in the manor chapel.
59
A right might be gained by like means to have
certain land fenced by the owner of the neighboring lot.
60
Now, it may
readily be conceded that even rights like the last two, when attached
to land, were looked at as property, and were spoken of as the subject
of grant. (Page 353).

Now, it may
readily be conceded that even rights like the last two, when attached
to land, were looked at as property, and were spoken of as the subject
of grant.
61
It may be conceded that, in many cases where the statement sounds strange to modern
ears, the obligation was regarded as
falling on the land alone, and not on the person of the tenant. And
it may be conjectured that this view arose naturally and reasonably
from there having been originally no remedy to compel performance
of such services, except a distress executed on the servient land.
62
But
any conjectured distinction between obligations for which the prim- (Page 353).
itive remedy was distress alone, and others, if it ever existed, must
soon have faded from view; and the line between those rights which
can be deemed rights of property, and those which are mere contracts, is hard to see,
after the last examples. A covenant to repair is
commonly supposed to be pure matter of contract. What is the difference between a duty
to repair, and a duty to fence? The difficulty
remains almost as great as ever of finding the dividing line between
the competing principles of transfer,—succession on the one side,
and possession of dominant land on the other. If a right in the nature
of an easement could be attached to land by prescription, it could
equally be attached by grant. If it went with the land in one case, even
into the hands of a disseisor, it must have gone with it in the other. No
satisfactory distinction could be based on the mode of acquisition,
63
nor was any attempted. As the right was not confined to assigns, there
was no need of mentioning assigns.
64
In modern times, at least, if not
in early law, such rights can be created by covenant as well as by
grant.
65 (Page 354).
We are now ready for a case
73
decided under Edward III., which
has been discussed from the time of Fitzherbert and Coke down to
Lord St. Leonards and Mr. Rawle, which is still law, and is said to remain still
unexplained.
74
It shows the judges hesitating between the
two conceptions to which this Lecture has been devoted. If they are
understood, I think the explanation will be clear.
Pakenham brought covenant as heir of the covenantee against a
prior, for breach of a covenant made by the defendant’s predecessor
with the plaintiff’s great-grandfather, that the prior and convent
should sing every week in a chapel in his manor, for him and his servants. The defendant
first pleaded that the plaintiff and his servants
were not dwelling within the manor; but, not daring to rest his case
on that, he pleaded that the plaintiff was not heir, but that his elder
brother was. The plaintiff replied that he was tenant of the manor,
and that his great-grandfather enfeoffed a stranger, who enfeoffed the
plaintiff and his wife; and that thus the plaintiff was tenant of the
manor by purchase, and privy to the ancestor; and also that the (Page 356).
ancestor; and also that the services had been rendered for a time whereof the memory was
not.
It is evident from these pleadings that assigns were not mentioned
 in the covenant, and so it has always been taken.
75
It also appears that
the plaintiff was trying to stand on two grounds; first, privity, as descendant and assign
of the covenantee; second, that the service was
attached to the manor by covenant or by prescription, and that he
could maintain covenant as tenant of the manor, from whichever
source the duty arose.
Finchden, J. puts the case of parceners making partition, and one
covenanting with the other to acquit of suit. A purchaser has the ad- (Page 356).

vantage of the covenant. Belknap, for the defendants, agrees, but distinguishes. In that
case the acquittance falls on the land, and not on
the person.
76
(That is to say, such obligations follow the analogy of
easements, and, as the burden falls on the quasi servient estate, the
benefit goes with the dominant land to assigns, whether mentioned
or not, and they are not considered from the point of view of contract
at all. Warranty, on the other hand, is a contract pure and simple, and
lies in the blood,—falls on the person, not on the land.
77
)
Finchden: a fortiori in this case; for there the action was maintained because the plaintiff
was tenant of the land from which the
suit was due, and here he is tenant of the manor where the chapel is.
Wichingham, J.: If the king grants warren to another who is tenant
of the manor, he shall have warren, &c.; but the warren will not pass
by the grant [of the manor], because the warren is not appendant to
the manor. No more does it seem the services are here appendant to
the manor. (Page 357).
the manor.
Thorpe, C. J., to Belknap: “There are some covenants on which no
one shall have an action, but the party to the covenant, or his heir,
and some covenants have inheritance in the land, so that whoever has
the land by alienation, or in other manner, shall have action of covenant; [or, as it is
stated in Fitzherbert’s Abridgment,
78
the inhabitants
of the land as well as every one who has the land, shall have the covenant;] and when
you say he is not heir, he is privy of blood, and may
be heir:
79
and also he is tenant of the land, and it is a thing which is
annexed to the chapel, which is in the manor, and so annexed to the
manor, and so he has said that the services have been rendered for all (Page 357).
time whereof there is memory, whence it is right this action should be
maintained.” Belknap denied that the plaintiff counted on such a prescription; but Thorpe
said he did, and we bear record of it, and the
case was adjourned.
80
It will be seen that the discussion followed the lines marked out by
the pleading. One judge thought that the plaintiff was entitled to recover as tenant of the
manor. The other puisne doubted, but agreed
that the case must be discussed on the analogy of easements. The
Chief Justice, after suggesting the possibility of sufficient privity on
the ground that the plaintiff was privy in blood and might be heir,
turns to the other argument as more promising, and evidently founds
his opinion upon it.
81
It would almost seem that he considered a prescriptive right enough to support the
action, and it is pretty clear that
he thought that a disseisor would have had the same rights as the
plaintiff.
In the reign of Henry IV., another case
82
arose upon a covenant
very like the last. But this time the facts were reversed. (Page 358).
In the reign of Henry IV., another case
82
arose upon a covenant
very like the last. But this time the facts were reversed. The plaintiff
counted as heir, but did not allege that he was tenant of the manor.
The defendant, not denying the plaintiff’s descent, pleaded in substance that he was not
tenant of the manor in his own right. The
question raised by the pleadings, therefore, was whether the heir of
the covenantee could sue without being tenant of the manor. If the
covenant was to be approached from the side of contract, the heir was
party to it as representing the covenantee. If, on the other hand, it
was treated as amounting to the grant of a service like an easement, it
would naturally go with the manor if made to the lord of the manor.
It seems to have been thought that such a covenant might go either
way, according as it was made to the tenant of the manor or to a (Page 358).

stranger. Markham, one of the judges, says: “In a writ of covenant one
must be privy to the covenant if he would have a writ of covenant
or aid by the covenant. But, peradventure, if the covenant had been
made with the lord of the manor, who had inheritance in the manor,
ou issint come determination poit estre fait, it would be otherwise,”
which was admitted.
83
 It was assumed that the covenant was not so
made as to attach to the manor, and the court, observing that the service was rather
spiritual than temporal, were inclined to think that
the heir could sue.
84
The defendant accordingly pleaded over and set
up a release. It will be seen how fully this agrees with the former case. (Page 359).
reported by Lord Coke. In the argument of Chudleigh’s Case the line
is drawn thus: “Always, the warranty as to voucher requires privity of
estate to which it was annexed,” (i.e. succession to the original covenantee), “and the
same law of a use. . . . But of things annexed to land,
it is otherwise, as of commons, advowsons, and the like appendants
or appurtenances. . . . So a disseisor, abator, intruder, or the lord by
escheat, &c., shall have them as things annexed to the land. So note a
diversity between a use of warranty, and the like things annexed to
the estate of the land in privity, and commons, advowsons, and other
hereditaments annexed to the possession of the land.”
85
And this, it
seems to me, is the nearest approach which has ever been made to the
truth.
Coke, in his Commentary on Littleton (385 a), takes a distinction
between a warranty, which binds the party to yield lands in recompense, and a covenant
annexed to the land, which is to yield but damages. (Page 359).
These questions have not lost their importance. Covenants for title
are in every deed, and other covenants are only less common, which,
it remains to show, belong to the other class.
Chief among these is the covenant to repair. It has already been
observed that an easement of fencing may be annexed to land, and
it was then asked what was the difference in kind between a right to
have another person build such structures, and a right to have him
repair structures already built. Evidence is not wanting to show that
the likeness was perceived. Only, as such covenants are rarely, if ever,
made, except in leases, there is always privity to the original parties.
For the lease could not, and the reversion would not be likely to, go by
disseisin. (Page 361).
The Dean of Windsor’s Case decides that such a covenant binds an
assignee of the term, although not named. It is reported in two books
of the highest authority, one of the reporters being Lord Coke, the
other Croke, who was also a judge. Croke gives the reason thus: “For a
covenant which runs and rests with the land lies for or against the assignee at the
common law, quia transit terra cum onere, although the
assignees be not named in the covenant.”
92
This is the reason which
governed easements, and the very phrase which was used to account
 for all possessors being bound by a covenant binding a parcel of land
to warranty. Coke says, “For such covenant which extends to the support of the thing
demised is quo-dammodo appurtenant to it, and
goes with it.” Again the language of easements. And to make this
plainer, if need be, it is added, “If a man grants to one estovers to repair his house, it is
appurtenant to his house.”
93
Estovers for repair
went with the land, like other rights of common,
94
which, as Lord
Coke has told us, passed even to disseisors. (Page 362).

C. It is impossible, however, to tell by general reasoning what rights

will be held in English law to belong to the former class, or where the
line will be drawn between the two. The authorities must be consulted
as an arbitrary fact. Although it might sometimes seem that the test
of the first was whether the service was of a nature capable of grant,
so that if it rested purely in covenant it would not follow the land,
101
yet if this test were accepted, it has already been shown that, apart
from tradition, some services which do follow the land could only be
matter of covenant. The grant of light and air, a well-established easement, is called a
covenant not to build on the servient land to the injury of the light, by Baron Parke.
102
And although this might be
doubted,
103
it has been seen that at least one well-established easement, that of fencing, cannot be
considered as a right granted out of
the servient land with any more propriety than a hundred other services which would be
only matter of contract if the law allowed them
to be annexed to land in like manner. The duty to repair exists only
by way of covenant, yet the reasoning of the leading cases is drawn
from the law of easement. (Page 365).
The duty to repair exists only
by way of covenant, yet the reasoning of the leading cases is drawn
from the law of easement. On the other hand, a covenant by a lessee
to build a wall upon the leased premises was held, in Spencer’s Case,
not to bind assigns unless mentioned;
104
but Lord Coke says that it
would have bound them if it had purported to. The analogy of war- (Page 365).

The general object of this Lecture is to discover the theory on

which a man is allowed to enjoy a special right when the facts out of
 which the right arises are not true of him. The transfer of easements
presented itself as one case to be explained, and that has now been
analyzed, and its influence on the law has been traced. But the principle of such transfers
is clearly anomalous, and does not affect the
general doctrine of the law. The general doctrine is that which has
been seen exemplified in prescription, warranty, and such covenants
as followed the analogy of warranty. Another illustration which has
not yet been mentioned is to be found in the law of uses. (Page 366).

In old times a use was a chose in action,—that is, was considered

very nearly from the point of view of contract, and it had a similar
history to that which has been traced in other cases. At first it was
doubted whether proof of such a secret trust ought to be allowed,
even as against the heir.
105
It was allowed, however, in the end,
106
and
then the principle of succession was extended to the assign. But it
never went further. Only those who were privies in estate with the
original feoffee to uses, were bound by the use. A disseisor was no
more bound by the confidence reposed in his disseisee, than he was
entitled to vouch his disseisee’s warrantor. In the time of Henry VIII.
it was said that “where a use shall be, it is requisite that there be two
things, sc. confidence, and privity: . . . as I say, if there be not privity or
confidence, then there can be no use: and hence if the feoffees make a
feoffment to one who has notice of the use, now the law will adjudge
him seised to the first use, since there is sufficient privity between the (Page 366).

first feoffer and him, for if he [i. e. the first feoffer] had warranted he
[the last feoffee] should vouch as assign, which proves privity; and he
is in in the per by the feoffees; but where one comes into the land in
the post, as the lord by escheat or the disseisor, then the use is altered
and changed, because privity is wanting.”
107
To this day it is said that a trust is annexed in privity to the person
and to the estate
108
(which means to the persona). It is not regarded as
issuing out of the land like a rent, so that while a rent binds every one
who has the land, no matter how, a disseisor is not bound by the
trust.
109
The case of the lord taking by escheat has been doubted,
110
 and it will be remembered that there is a difference between Bracton
and later authors as to whether he comes in as quasi heres or as a
stranger.
Then as to the benefit of the use. We are told that the right to sue
the subpœna descended indeed to the heir, on the ground of heres
eadem persona cum antecessore, but that it was not assets.
111
The cestui
que use was given power to sell by an early statute. (Page 367).
But with regard
to trusts, Lord Coke tells us that in the reign of Queen Elizabeth all
the judges in England held that a trust could not be assigned, “because it was a matter in
privity between them, and was in the nature
of a chose in action.”
113
Uses and trusts were both devisable, however,
from an early day,
114
and now trusts are as alienable as any form of
property. (Page 367).

The history of early law everywhere shows that the difficulty of

transferring a mere right was greatly felt when the situation of fact
from which it sprung could not also be transferred. Analysis shows
that the difficulty is real. The fiction which made such a transfer conceivable has now
been explained, and its history has been followed
until it has been seen to become a general mode of thought. It is now
a matter of course that the buyer stands in the shoes of the seller, or,
in the language of an old law-book,
115
that “the assign is in a manner
quasi successor to his assignor.” Whatever peculiarities of our law rest
on that assumption may now be understood. (Page 368).

(…)

Notes on Introduction by G. Edward White

T
h e f i r s t q u e s t i o n that needs to be asked about The Common Law is why, more
than a century after its publication, it is
still worth reading. A conventional response is that it continues to be
regarded as a major work of American jurisprudence. But that answer does not tell us
what makes The Common Law important; nor,
for that matter, does it help the modern reader navigate through its
dense and often obscure pages.
 In the fall of 1880, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was invited to deliver the Lowell
Institute Lectures in Boston. That lecture series was
designed for professionals and lay people enthusiastic about the subjects covered by the
talks.
1
The expected audience for Holmes’s lectures, on the common law, would have been
practicing lawyers and
legal academics, some law students, and others with a particular interest in the scholarly
treatment of legal topics, the sorts of people (Page vii).

who would have been acquainted with Holmes’s numerous articles in

the 1870s in the American Law Review, a legal journal founded in the
late 1860s.
Attorneys, legal scholars, law students, and occasional nonspecialists still make up the
audience for The Common Law today. But
though many readers recognize Holmes as one of the most famous
judges in American history and The Common Law as his primary
work of scholarship, few have more than a passing acquaintance with
the book’s contents. Most people, specialists and nonspecialists alike,
find The Common Law a challenging book.
Consider this set of comments from a group of Holmes scholars.
Holmes’s first authorized biographer, Mark DeWolfe Howe, noted in
1963 that “though often started,” The Common Law “is seldom finished by today’s
readers.” In Howe’s judgment, it was “a difficult
book,” being “made up for the most part of closely-reasoned analysis
of certain aspects of English legal history and certain problems of jurisprudence” that
Howe speculated were “less important” to his own, (Page viii).

twentieth-century contemporaries than they were to Holmes’s original audience. He

noted that though many people still “found the
mind and achievements of Holmes to be matters of absorbing interest,” they “looked
more to his judicial opinions, essays, speeches, and
letters, than to The Common Law.”
2
In 1977 Grant Gilmore, working to complete the biography that
Howe had begun, went further.
3
The lectures in The Common Law,
Gilmore wrote, “have long since become unreadable unless the reader
is prepared to put forward an almost superhuman effort of will to
keep his attention from flagging and his interest from wandering.”
4
In 1993 Morton Horwitz, seeking to locate The Common Law in the
late nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of American jurisprudence, largely agreed
with Gilmore. Although he concluded that The (Page viii).
Common Law was a “great work,” Horwitz found it “obscure and inaccessible,” and
noted that it was “very rarely read.”
5
These comments suggest that difficulties with The Common Law
are not simply a product of the arcane historical data Holmes surveys.
Indeed, he often does not make clear the relationship between that
data and what he identifies as central themes in American jurisprudence. In some
chapters, such as that on criminal law, historical evidence is largely absent. In others,
Holmes’s descriptions of the historical evolution of common law fields seem
indistinguishable from
his policy prescriptions about the scope of liability in those fields.
Thus modern readers may fail not only to understand the details
of Holmes’s history but also to grasp the point of his historical exegesis. (Page ix).

These difficulties with The Common Law can be contrasted with

another recurrent impression readers have had of the book. From
its initial publication, many have recognized the suggestiveness and
depth of the jurisprudential observations it contains. In 1889 the English legal historian
Frederic Maitland predicted that “for a long time
to come,” The Common Law would “leave its mark wide and deep on
all the best thoughts of Americans and Englishmen about the history
of their common law.”
6
It is a book of “wide and deep” statements
about the nature of judge-fashioned law and the process of its development over time;
those statements, often rendered in memorable
language, have repeatedly given readers the impression that they are
encountering a work of extraordinary quality.
But the difficulty of extracting Holmes’s perspective from the obscure narrative in which
he sought to present it remains. If The Common Law’s inaccessibility makes it difficult
for most people to read,
let alone understand, how can we appreciate its greatness? Prospective readers might be
well advised, given the experience of the schol- (Page ix).

ars quoted above, not to plunge directly into the text without first
gaining a fuller view of its author.
When he received the invitation to give the Lowell Lectures, Holmes
was at a frustrating point in his professional life. He turned thirtyeight the year the
invitation came, and he had been pursuing a variety
of legal projects for the previous thirteen years. In addition to practicing law in Boston,
he had published several scholarly articles and
written a number of book notes, digests of reports of cases, and commentaries in the
American Law Review. He had edited the twelfth edition of James Kent’s famous legal
treatise Commentaries on American
Law, to which he also contributed a set of new annotations. He had
 served as an editor of The American Law Review and offered two lecture courses at
Harvard College. In short, he had followed the prescription he laid down for himself in a
diary entry in 1866: “immerse
myself in the law completely,” which “a man must [do] . . . if he would
be a first rate lawyer.” (Page x).

Holmes’s friends and colleagues were aware of the intensity and

single-mindedness with which Holmes approached his professional
pursuits. In 1869 John C. Ropes, a fellow Boston practitioner and one
of the founders of the American Law Review, said that his contemporaries “had never
known of anyone in the law who studied anything
like as hard” as Holmes did, and the mother of William and Henry
James, close friends of Holmes at the time, described him as having “a
power of work.”
8
Arthur Sedgwick, who would become co-editor of
the American Law Review with Holmes in 1870, wrote to Henry James
that year that Holmes “knows more law than anyone in Boston of our
time, and works harder at it than anyone.”
9
Three years later James’s
mother, noting that Holmes carried his manuscript on Kent to the
dinner table on one occasion, observed: “His pallid face, and this fear- (Page x).

ful grip on his work, make him a melancholy sight.”

10
By 1876 William
James was describing Holmes as “a powerful battery, formed like
a planing machine to gouge a deep self-beneficial groove through
life.”
11
The intensity of Holmes’s engagement with legal scholarship had
deep roots. By the time he had enrolled in Harvard Law School at the
age of twenty-three, a series of experiences had prompted him to
search for an overriding philosophical perspective on his chosen profession, and on the
universe in general. Those experiences had begun
in the spring of his senior year at Harvard College, when he enlisted
in a regiment of Massachusetts volunteer soldiers after the Civil War
broke out. In the summer of 1861, having graduated from Harvard, he
secured a commission in the Union Army and fought in active service, mainly as an
infantry officer, until July 1864, when he declined to
re-enlist for another three years and was honorably discharged. He
was wounded three times in action, in the chest, neck, and foot, and
spent about a third of his military service recuperating from those
injuries. (Page xi). By the time he left his regiment, nearly all his close friends
had been killed, wounded, or transferred to other units.
 Holmes had enlisted in the army under the influence of some close
friends at Harvard who were abolitionists, and because he believed
that fighting for a noble cause, such as antislavery, was a chivalric
ideal. As late as April 1864, Holmes was referring to the war as “the
Christian Crusade of the 19th century,” fought on behalf of “the cause
of the whole civilized world.”
12
But a month later he told his parents
that if he survived the remainder of his enlistment he would not return to service. He had
come to believe that there was no clear connection between the ideals that might motivate
soldiers and the arbitrary realities of wartime service. “I can do a disagreeable thing or
face a great danger coolly enough when I know it is a duty,” he wrote
to his mother after resolving to leave the army, “but a doubt demoral- (Page xi).

izes me as it does any nervous man.” “I am not the same man,” he had
written to his parents in May of that year. “[I] may not have the same
ideas.”
13
The Civil War had been a deeply unsettling experience for Holmes
and his generation. In the years between Holmes’s birth in 1841 and
the time he entered Harvard in 1857, the territory and population of
the United States had grown significantly; the railroad and the telegraph had
revolutionized long-distance transportation and communication; and American writers
and artists had begun to attract international as well as national audiences. Holmes’s
father, who became
editor of the Atlantic Monthly in 1857 and began to publish his highly
popular “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” stories in that journal,
seemed to be at the very center of an American renaissance in which
highbrow literature and the arts would become popularized on a
large scale. The unique abundance of the American continent, and
the geographic isolation of the United States from war-torn Europe,
seemed to guarantee a promising future for Americans of Holmes’s
generation. (Page xii).

But as Holmes’s undergraduate years came to a close, the continued existence of a union
of American states suddenly seemed precarious. Instead of anticipating a leisurely,
comfortable transition from
college to a career in Boston, Holmes found himself, in his senior year
at Harvard, serving as a bodyguard for the abolitionist Wendell Phillips, whose
antislavery speeches in Boston had been met with threats
of violence. That commitment led Holmes to others, and instead of
emerging from Harvard as a young Boston intellectual, pursuing literature, philosophy,
and the choice of a profession, he had become a
soldier and, eventually, a “demoralized” and “nervous” one. Even the (Page xii).
chivalric ideal of an antislavery crusade had not sustained him in the
face of seemingly purposeless and random death. Lewis Einstein, a
 diplomat who had a long correspondence with Holmes in the first
three decades of the twentieth century, recalled Holmes’s once telling
him that “after the Civil War the world never seemed quite right
again.”
14
As the war ended, Holmes’s generation struggled to reconcile
Darwinist-inspired “scientific” explanations of change in the universe
with belief in a basic moral order. They hoped that adherence to traditional moral and
religious values would counter what now appeared to be the inevitable tendency of
societies to be in a constant
evolutionary state. Just as they began to internalize the Darwinist insight that the history
of a civilization might be best described as a
continuous progression of qualitative change, they were confronted
with the first signs of modernity in American society. Against a cultural backdrop of
advancing industrial capitalism, increased participatory democracy, and the weakening of
a hierarchical class-based
social order, they thus considered the potential displacement of (Page xiii). religious-
based theories of causation in the universe by theories based
on the natural sciences. In this setting intellectuals of Holmes’s generation struggled to
fashion comprehensive secularized theories of
knowledge that could help them make sense of a new and unsettling
cultural experience.
15
In an autobiographical sketch Holmes had written for his Harvard
College album in July 1861, he stated, “If I survive the war, I expect to
study law as my profession or at least as a starting point.”
16
When he
returned from the war in the summer of 1864, his commitment seems
to have wavered, and he did not immediately take to the study of law.
Harvard Law School at the time had no admissions standards and no
examinations: its only requirement for a degree was periodic attendance at lectures. After
three semesters Holmes stopped doing even (Page xiii).

that, attaching himself to the law office of a friend in January 1866

and “look[ing] up some cases.”
17
Harvard still awarded him a degree
in June 1866. In 1870 Holmes would describe the law school he had
attended as “almost a disgrace to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” an institution
that had “[done] something every year to injure
the profession . . . and to discourage real students.”
18
Between 1866 and 1868 Holmes remained interested in philosophical issues, maintaining
a close friendship with William James and
participating in “a philosophical society” that met regularly to discuss
 “the tallest and broadest questions” of metaphysics.
19
Holmes had
earlier written to James that he had come to the “conviction” that “law
. . . may be approached in the interests of science and may be studied . . . with the
preservation of one’s ideals.”
20
Approaching law “in
the interests of science” precipitated his ventures in legal editing, lecturing, and writing
as well as in law practice in the 1870s. The idea
of extracting the fundamental principles of the common law in
America and placing them in some kind of “scientific” order remained
at the back of his thoughts. (Page xiv).
It was as if Holmes viewed his efforts to
order fields of legal knowledge as a chastened substitute for the chivalric ideals that had
lost intelligibility for him in the carnage of the
Civil War.
Holmes explained the intensity of his professional pursuits in an
1879 letter to James Bryce, an English legal scholar with whom he
shared an interest in jurisprudential issues. “The men here who really
care more for a fruitful thought than for a practical success are few
everywhere,” he wrote.
I wish that the necessity of making a living didn’t preclude any
choice on my part—for I hate business and dislike practice apart
from arguing cases . . . As it is I console myself by studying toward a
vanishing point which is the center of perspective in my land- (Page xiv). scape—but
that has to be done at night for the most part and is
wearing, and my articles though fragmentary in form and accidental in order are part of
what lies in a whole in my mind—my
scheme to analyze what seem to me the fundamental notions and
principles of our substantive law, putting them in an order which
is a part of or results from the fundamental conceptions.
21
The Lowell Institute invitation would give Holmes a chance to
pursue that scheme. The timing of the invitation, given Holmes’s state
of mind when he wrote to Bryce, might have been thought almost
miraculous, but it was also awkward. The Lowell Institute course of
lectures consisted of twelve sessions, given on Tuesday and Friday
evenings in the months of November and December: Holmes’s invitation was for the
1880 series, and since he wrote an entry in one of
his notebooks for that year indicating that he had begun writing the
lectures “about Jan. 1,” one may surmise that the invitation did not
come before the fall of 1879 at the earliest. (Page xv).

In June 1880, Holmes

 wrote to Pollock that his evenings had been “largely devoted to preparing a course of
lectures for next winter.”
23
Later, after the lectures
were published as The Common Law, he sent Pollock a copy and noted
that he had “failed in all correspondence and . . . abandoned pleasure
as well as a good deal of sleep for a year” to produce the lectures.
24
Despite the pressure that writing the lectures placed on Holmes,
the invitation to synthesize the ideas he had been developing about
law came at a felicitous time. He had been struggling since entering
law school with a concern he was to describe much later in his life:
how to reconcile the apparently prosaic and unorganized details of
legal study with his interest in developing a scientific or philosophical—words he used
as synonyms—approach to a field of knowledge.
“When I began,” Holmes wrote in 1913, “the law presented itself as a
ragbag of details. . . . It was not without anguish that one asked one- (Page xv).

self whether the subject was worthy of the interest of an intelligent

man.”
25
By the late 1870s he had concluded that law could open the
way to philosophy, and he began the process of developing a wideranging jurisprudential
perspective. (Page xvi).

Holmes’s Common Law lectures, in the main, consisted of historical

surveys of common law fields, in which Holmes charted the course of
doctrine. Those surveys were designed to arrange common law subjects in a
“philosophically continuous series.”
26
Holmes wanted not
only to trace the evolution of doctrine but also to “reconsider the
popular reasons” on which doctrinal rules had been justified, and “to
decide anew whether those reasons are satisfactory.”
27
The result of
his simultaneous attention to history and to the public policy implications of doctrine, he
believed, would reveal the defining architecture of common law fields. (Page xvi).
Holmes had some normative goals embedded in his approach, and
he made no bones about them. His historical overviews were designed to reveal the
unarticulated “views of public policy” undergirding established doctrinal rules, thereby
freeing up those rules for reexamination.
28
He intended to “prove,” he noted at the end of the first
chapter of The Common Law, “that by the very necessity of its nature,
[law] is continually transmuting [subjective] moral standards into
 external or objective ones, from which the actual guilt of the party
concerned is wholly eliminated.”
29
The law was constantly evolving in the direction not only of establishing external and
objective standards of liability, Holmes announced, but also of limiting the scope of
liability as far as possible.
Socially useful activities that injured others were to be subjected to
liability only when they were, from the point of view of the community, intentionally or
foreseeably dangerous.
30
The purpose of the (Page xvi). criminal law was to deter antisocial conduct by
identifying “blameworthy” behavior from an external point of view, rather than focusing
on the motives of criminals.
31
Contract law reduced itself to a
simple, universal proposition. Once a contract had been made, the
promisor had the option of fulfilling the contract or “pay[ing] damages if the promised
event does not come to pass.” Whether a contract
had been made, and whether it had been breached, were to be determined by objective
and external standards. Damages for a breach of
contract were limited to what reasonable persons would think its ordinary consequences.
32 (Page xvii).

Holmes’s methodology in The Common Law has alternately frustrated modern readers or
made them suspicious. In an age in which
the view that historical scholarship primarily exists to “prove” the
universality of prevailing contemporary values has largely been discarded, readers have
become inclined to react skeptically toward the
historical findings of work conducted in that vein. As a result,
Holmes’s historical exegesis in The Common Law has ceased to be regarded as
presumptively persuasive and become, to many, simply bewildering. Some modern
readers have been tempted to conclude that
Holmes was reading his historical sources purposively, finding in
them support for arranging legal subjects around theories of liability
that he found congenial. Thus readers of The Common Law today,
while noting some of its elegant language, have had difficulty empathizing with
Holmes’s methodological perspective. To surmount that
difficulty, we must revisit Holmes’s efforts, in his scholarship leading
up to The Common Law, to derive an overarching jurisprudential
point of view, and to connect those efforts to the intellectual and cultural predicament in
which Holmes and his contemporaries found
themselves in the decades after the Civil War. (Page xvii).

By the time he wrote The Common Law, Holmes had identified

three variables that, in his view, combined to shape the evolution of (Page xvii).
common law fields. “We must alternately consult history and existing
theories of legislation,” he announced, and “understand the combination of the two into
new products at every stage.” Determining the
“combination” of the first two variables was the “most difficult labor”
his approach required, and it was the most important.
33
It had taken
him some time to recognize this.
None of the variables Holmes identified as central elements of his
perspective in The Common Law had received emphasis in his first
efforts at legal scholarship. In those works he had been preoccupied with constructing
“arrangements of the law” that might be sufficiently comprehensive to organize, in some
kind of philosophical
order, the “ragbag of details” he had encountered in his early legal
studies. Holmes’s interest in organizing legal fields into philosophically integrated
“arrangements” can be seen as part of a more general
intellectual search for order that preoccupied American scholars after
the Civil War. (Page xviii). As noted, Holmes had mustered out of the Civil War in an
unsettled intellectual state, hoping to find some way of organizing knowledge and
ordering experience in the methodologies of philosophy
and natural science. But he had difficulty, in his early years as a
scholar, finding the basis for an overarching philosophical organization of legal subjects.
He found no basis for constructing a scientific classification of legal subjects in the writ
system,
34
in Austin’s
view that the law emanated from the command of a sovereign,
35
or in
a conception of law that emphasized rights.
36
He also rejected the
codification of common law fields, believing that codified principles
could not fully resolve new cases, and “it is the merit of the common law that it decides
the cases first and determines the principle
afterwards.”
37
Between 1870 and 1873, he explored the idea that “a sound classificat
legal subjects “based on duties and not on rights.”
38
In three articles
written in that period he identified different types of duties and produced analytical
tables outlining their nature and scope.
39
But he soon
discovered areas of the law that did not seem consistent with a dutybased arrangement.
After failing to explain them, he concluded, in
1878, that the term “duty” was “open to objection,” and he abandoned
the effort.

By then Holmes had become interested in three other bases from

which common law fields might be arranged in a “philosophically
continuous series.” One was the idea that law might best be described
as a compilation of the recurrent sources on which judges grounded
their decisions. As early as 1872 Holmes had remarked that “in a civilized state” it was
“not the will of the sovereign that makes lawyers’
law . . . but what . . . the judges, by whom it is enforced, say is his will.”
Thus “the only question for the lawyer is, how will the judges act?”
Any source on which judges based their decisions, “be it constitution,
statute, custom, or precedent, which can be relied upon as likely in
the generality of cases to prevail, is worthy of consideration as one of
the sources of law.”
41
The critical portion of that sentence was “which
can be relied upon as likely in the generality of cases to prevail.”
Holmes was suggesting that an examination of judicial decisions over
time might unearth the general principles judges repeatedly identified as governing cases
in a common law field. (Page xix).

At the time he made that comment, Holmes was in the process of

reading and digesting numerous cases in his work on the twelfth edition of Kent’s
Commentaries. He had decided that his principal contribution to the edition would come
through annotations of recent
cases in common law fields that Kent had covered. He prepared extensive notes on those
of Kent’s topics that were “the present fighting
grounds of the law,” such as the history of property in land, vicarious
liability, easements, covenants running with the land, and warranty in (Page xix).

the law of sales.

42
Holmes engaged in extensive surveys of the relevant
cases for the topics in question, compiling the various rationales on
which judges grounded results in those cases. Here was evidence that
the law itself might simply be a composite of the rationales that were
most regularly advanced.
But Holmes had noticed something else during his research for
Kent’s work. He had observed that on many occasions an established
legal doctrine was followed even though the original rationale on
which it had been based was no longer regarded as sensible. In such
instances the original rationale was not emphasized, and a “formal”
reason for following the doctrine, such as fidelity to precedent, was
 advanced instead. But the formal reason was not the true basis for
following the established doctrine: the true basis was that it was attractive from the
standpoint of contemporary public policy. Eventually Holmes was to describe this
phenomenon as “the paradox of
form and substance in the development of law.”
43 (Page xx).
He would identify it
as the second basis on which a comprehensive ordering of common
law subjects might be erected. His elucidation of that paradox would
stimulate him to articulate the core, defining elements of his jurisprudential perspective.
That articulation would not come until just before Holmes delivered the Common Law
lectures. Between the completion of his work
on Kent and his subsequent explorations of the paradox of form and
substance in judicial decisions, Holmes would explore a third basis
on which to construct a scientific classification of common law fields.
That basis was history. Between 1873, when he completed his edition
of Kent and re-entered law practice on a full-time basis, and 1876,
when he next published a scholarly article in the American Law Review, Holmes began
to read widely in history sources. The titles he
noted in his reading lists between 1873 and 1876 included works in
ancient and medieval history and anthropology, as well as more than (Page xx).

fifty books on legal history. His lists revealed a particular interest

in works on “primitive” societies, particularly their legal systems.
Holmes was approaching history in the same fashion as many of his
late-nineteenth-century contemporaries, attempting to show that the
evolution of cultures over time confirmed the primacy of certain universal political
principles, or demonstrated the inevitable progression
from “primitive” to “civilized” stages of development. He was, at this
stage, a Darwinist historian.
44 (Page xxi).

Holmes initially anticipated using history “to prove,” as he put it in

an 1877 article titled “Primitive Notions in Modern Law,” the soundness of general
observations about law he had “arrived at analytically”
in the articles in which he had proposed “arrangements” of legal subjects.
45
But his forays in history did not necessarily reinforce those
general observations. Historical surveys revealed the existence of
common law doctrines that could not be accounted for in Holmes’s
duty-based classifications. One was a doctrine that allowed even a
person who had wrongfully displaced a landowner holding an easement through the land
of a neighbor to prevent anyone else, except
the neighbor, from obstructing the easement. “How comes it,” Holmes
asked, “that one who neither has possession [of the right of way] nor
title [to it] is so far favored?”
46 (Page xxi).

His answer to that question would eventually provide the critical

element of his jurisprudential perspective, the recognition that history and unarticulated
theories of public policy were constantly interacting in the doctrinal development of
common law fields. An examination of historical sources led him to the conclusion that
in
ancient and medieval times inanimate objects, such as land, were personified in the
language of legal decisions and commentary. Although
the sources stopped short of treating estates as legal persons, land was
nonetheless described in “personifying metaphors,” such as the common statement that a
“right of way” was “a quality of . . . a neighbor- (Page xxi).

ing piece of land.” Just as when “an axe was made the object of criminal process,” the
language of personifying land “survived . . . to create
confusion in reasoning.”
47
That confusion resulted in easements in land being treated as if
they were “owned” by the land itself, so that even people who wrongfully acquired titles
to lands gained control of the easements that went
with them.
But why, once the idea of inanimate objects possessing human
qualities was abandoned, did this doctrine survive? Holmes concluded that “where a
thing incapable of rights has been treated as
if capable of them,” it was “either by confusion of thought” or “on
grounds of policy.”
48
Even though the doctrine extending prescriptive
easements to wrongful possessors had resulted from abandoned anthropomorphic
conceptions of land, it had survived because it facilitated the quieting of land titles.
Possessors of land were presumed to
succeed to easements “running” with that land even when their possession might have
been unauthorized. (Page xxii).

This prevented the question

of who could enjoy, or not enjoy, rights of way across adjoining land
from arising every time a parcel of land with an easement changed
hands. A Darwinist approach, designed to reveal the survival of some
legal doctrines and the extinction of others, had been modified to
take into account the continued existence of doctrines whose “fitness”
rested on unarticulated grounds of policy.
Holmes’s identification of the paradox of form and substance in
the development of the law was an example of the “difficult labor”
involved in juxtaposing history with what he called “existing theories
of legislation” at every stage of the evolution of common law fields.
 By the time he wrote The Common Law, Holmes was able to articulate that insight in
general terms. “In order to know what [the law] is,”
he declared, “we must know what it has been, and what it tends to (Page xxii).
become,” and to “understand the combination of the two into new
products at every stage.” His methodology was designed to illustrate
that “the substance of the law at any given time pretty nearly corresponds . . . with what
is then understood to be convenient,” but “its
form and machinery, and the degree to which it is able to work out
desired results, depends very much on its past.”
49
Holmes had concluded, as he put it in the last scholarly work he published before the
Common Law lectures, that “the law finds its philosophy in history
and the nature of human needs.”
50 (Page xxiii).

Holmes’s methodology allowed one to consider simultaneously, in

the course of engaging in historical surveys of legal doctrine, historical evidence and
issues of contemporary policy. If one traced doctrine
looking for logical consistency, “failure and confusion” would often
result, because “precedents survive . . . long after the use they once
served is at an end, and the reason for them has been forgotten.”
51
If
the “reason for them” was historically based it could be identified, as
Holmes had done in his discussion of easements. If, however, doctrines survived as a
result of unarticulated grounds of public policy,
they could be “consider[ed] . . . with a freedom that was not possible
before” their historical basis had been exposed.
52
The methodology
thus enabled scholars to investigate the development of common law
doctrine both as historians and as students of contemporary public
policy. And that was just what Holmes did in The Common Law,
merging his surveys of the historical development of common law
doctrine with his goals of organizing common law subjects around
external standards of liability and limiting the scope of that liability
as far as possible.
We are now in a position (Page xxiii).
position to understand, from the point of view of
its author, the celebrated passage with which Holmes began The Common Law. The
passage reads: (Page xxiii).

The object of this book is to present a general view of the Common

Law. To accomplish this task, other tools are needed besides logic.
It is something to show that the consistency of a system requires a
particular result, but it is not all. The life of the law has not been
 logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the times, the
prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy,
avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share
with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the
syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies
the story of a nation’s development
through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and
corollaries of a book of mathematics.
In order to know what it is, we must know what it has been, and
what it tends to become. We must alternately consult history and
existing theories of legislation. But the most difficult labor will be
to understand the combination of the two into different products
at every stage. The substance of the law at any given time pretty
nearly corresponds, so far as it goes, with what is then understood
to be convenient; but its form and machinery, and the degree to
which it is able to work out desired results, depend very much
upon its past.
53 (Page xxiv). Because of Holmes’s juxtaposition of the tool of “logic” with that
of understanding “experience,” and because of his apparently slighting references to “the
syllogism” and “the axioms and corollaries” of
mathematics, the passage has regularly been taken as an attack on jurists who sought, as
Holmes put it in an earlier comment, to “reduce
the concrete details of [the] existing [common law] system to the
merely logical consequence of simple postulates.” Holmes had suggested that such an
approach was “always in danger of becoming
unscientific, and of leading to a misapprehension of the nature of the
problem and the data,” and he had identified Christopher Columbus (Page xxiv).

Langdell, the dean of Harvard Law School, as being “entirely . . . interested in the formal
connections of things, or logic, as distinguished
from the feelings which make the content of logic, and which have
actually shaped the substance of the law.”
54
The Holmes-Langdell juxtaposition, pitting “logic” against “experience,” has been a
tempting story. But the above passage from The
Common Law does not rule out “logic” as a useful tool for understanding the
development of common law subjects. It only states that
“other tools” are needed as well. “It is something to show that the
consistency of a system requires a particular result,” Holmes wrote in
the passage. He had sought to do just that in his early “arrangements”
of legal subjects. Nor was he uninterested in the syllogistic reasoning
that common law judges regularly employed in applying established
principles to new cases. He wanted to probe that reasoning, to identify the “feelings
which make the content of logic.” (Page xxv).

Next in the passage came alternative descriptions of what Holmes

 meant by “experience,” which he had called “the life of the law.” Experience included
“[t]he felt necessities of the time,” “prevalent moral
and political theories,” “intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious,” and even
“the prejudices which judges share with their fellowmen.” Those sentences have caused
twentieth- and twenty-first century devotees of Holmes to hail him for recognizing that
common
law judicial decisions can be seen as exercises in public policy undertaken by humans
with their culturally driven prejudices. Holmes may
have had more modest goals in writing the sentences. They reasserted
his view that the common law could best be understood as a composite of the rationales
judges used to ground the results they reached in
cases, and pointed out several sources of those rationales that tended
not to be explicitly articulated.
Holmes’s point was that the form of legal reasoning adopted by
judges often concealed its substance. This led him to suggest that to (Page xxv).

“know what [the law] is,” one needed to get beyond the surface “logic”
of decisions and consult history and theories of legislation. That suggestion brought him
to the center of his methodology, the simultaneous consultation of those variables in
order to understand the paradox of form and substance at the heart of the development of
common law fields. It was that simultaneous consultation that ultimately freed the jurist
from too single-minded a focus on the law’s
logical consistency, its history, or its underlying “theories of legislation,” and made
possible the integration of those variables into a
comprehensive “general view” of the common law. (Page xxvi).

Historians have recognized that Holmes’s generation of post–Civil

War intellectuals had three abiding concerns, some of which have
been mentioned. One was an interest in deriving organizing and stabilizing principles of
secularized knowledge in response to the crushing influence of the war on early
nineteenth-century religious-based
versions of romanticism and idealism. A second was enthusiasm for
the promise of science—notably the natural sciences—for developing theories and
techniques for making sense of the universe. A third
was a willingness to embrace the idea of history as qualitative change,
so that the course of a culture’s development could be seen, not as a
cyclical process of birth, maturity, and decay, but as a constant progression in which the
future was always an improvement on the past.
55
One can see all those aspirations in the perspective on American jurisprudence that
Holmes offered in The Common Law. His methodology was secularized, “scientific” in
the late nineteenth-century
sense, historicist, and in search of a comprehensive general approach
to the common law. (Page xxvi).

The enduring feature of The Common Law is not the way Holmes
presents his history, nor the policy conclusions he draws from it. Both (Page xxvi).

those features demonstrate the time-boundedness of the work. But a

third feature transcends time: Holmes’s recognition that exploring
the relationship between history, the formal “logic” of justifications
for legal decisions, and the unarticulated cultural assumptions that
help shape those decisions captures the essence of common law judging in America.
(Page xxvii).

Common law judging is a product of both “external” and “internal” factors, and it cannot
adequately be understood without attention to the way those factors interact in the
formation of a judicial
decision. The external factors lie in the culture in which judicial decisions are situated,
emerging in the form of unarticulated “intuitions,”
“prejudices,” and avowed and unconscious “motives of public policy”
that emanate from that culture. The internal factors lie in the fact that
judicial decisions require formal justifications which emphasize legal
doctrine, and that those justifications seek to create a “logic” emphasizing governing
doctrinal rules deemed to be apposite to the decision. In any judicial decision, at any
point in time, the external and
internal factors influencing it will be different, (Page xxvii).
different, and in different combination. Holmes’s point is that they will always be there
and that history helps us understand their different combinations. To understand
their interaction in a given case is to understand the decision in that
case in a broad and deep fashion; and to understand their interaction
in a number of cases, across time, is to understand, in a comparable
fashion, how the common law develops.
We can think of all common law cases as simultaneously raising
the imperatives of continuity with the past, of logical consistency
with existing doctrine, and of a search for a “just result,” that is, one in
conformity with “prevailing moral theories” and current “intuitions
of public policy.” Thinking about common law judging in that fashion, we can see how
Holmes’s explanation of judicial decision-making
highlights the incentives for common law judges to emphasize formal (Page xxvii).
legal rationales for their decisions and to de-emphasize “what is then
understood to be convenient,” according to the unarticulated social
and political assumptions of the age.
The paradox of form and substance exists in the common law because judges are not
supposed to be deciding cases on the basis of
their intuitions and “prejudices” about matters of public policy, even
if those intuitions and prejudices are widely shared by other actors in
the culture at the time. Judges, who are typically not as directly accountable to the public
as elected officials, are supposed to be putting aside their idiosyncratic human reactions
so as to decide cases
impartially and neutrally. The fact that judges are not fully able to do
that does not mean that they should not try. The ideal of a “rule of
 law,” transcendent of human will and power, is bound up in that aspiration. (Page
xxviii).
The perspective Holmes adopted in The Common Law captures
the interplay between the aspirations for judicial behavior in a culture committed to the
rule of law and the way the process of deciding
cases actually plays out. The “form and machinery” of legal decisions
and “the degree to which [established doctrine] is able to work out
desired results” depend upon the past, because it is from the past that
established precedents are drawn, and those precedents can be employed as “formal”
signals that a judge’s decision is based on the rule
of law, not on that judge’s prejudices or intuitions. And yet those
prejudices and intuitions, understood as reflections of the “felt necessities of the times”
and of “prevalent moral and political decisions,”
are helping drive the decision. Helping drive it, not fully driving it.
The decision, Holmes suggests, will be a complex product of both
form and substance.
Looking simultaneously at history, doctrine and its logical arrangements, and the
messages of contemporary culture as they
emerge in the form of prevalent moral and political theories takes us (Page xxviii).
to the very center of judicial decision-making. No better description
of judge-fashioned law, still the primary element of American jurisprudence, has been
made. No more serviceable set of variables for
studying the course of the development of that law in America has
been put forth. Holmes managed to capture, in his elliptical, suggestive fashion, the
trade-offs judges make in common law cases; why
judicial opinions tend more in the direction of concealing rather than
revealing those trade-offs; and why that understanding of common
law judging can best be grasped by comparing judicial opinions
across time.
Thus readers have good reasons to continue to tackle The Common
Law, even if some of the detail on its pages is initially off-putting.
Once they extrapolate the historical origins, and contemporary utility, of Holmes’s
perspective, that detail will prove less inaccessible. (Page xxix).

1. Holmes delivered twelve lectures, but only eleven appeared in The

Common Law: the twelfth was a summary. The “Closure of the Lowell
Lectures,” a précis of the twelfth lecture, was published in the Boston Daily
Advertiser on January 1, 1881. The Daily Advertiser also noted that “[n]o
other course in the [Lowell] institute has been attended by so large a
proportion of young men,” and that “having sketched his course,” Holmes
“gave a few minutes at the close of the [last] lecture to a picture of the scope,
beauties, pleasures, and horrors of the law.” A portion of the Advertiser’s
précis appears in The Collected Works of Justice Holmes: Complete Public
Writings and Selected Judicial Opinions of Oliver Wendell Holmes, ed.
Sheldon Novick, 5 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), vol. 3,
pp. 104–106. (Page xxix).
of the State of New York, as Amended to 1870, 5 Am. L. Rev. 359 (1871).
35. In a notice of Frederick Pollock’s article “Law and Command” in the
April 1, 1872, issue of The Law Magazine and Review, Holmes said that
“Austin’s definition was not satisfactory from a philosophical point of view,”
because “there might be law without sovereignty, and . . . where there is a
sovereign, properly so called, other bodies not sovereign might generate law
in a philosophical sense against the will of the sovereign.” [Holmes], 6 Am.
L. Rev. 723–24 (1872).
36. In 1872 Holmes wrote that in his “Codes, and Arrangements of the
Law” article, written two years earlier, he had “expressed the opinion that a
sound classification of the law was impossible” on the basis of “the derivative notion,
rights.” He reaffirmed that view. Holmes, “The Arrangement of
the Law–Privity,” 7 Am. L. Rev. 46 (1872). (Page xxxii). 1873): vol. 2, pp. 260, 479;
vol. 3, p.419; vol. 4, pp. 441, 480.
43. Holmes first used the phrase in “Common Carriers and the Common
Law,” 13 Am. L. Rev. 609, 630 (1879).
44. For a discussion of “evolutionary” methodologies in late nineteenthcentury German
scholarship, see Mathias Reimann, “Holmes’ Common Law
and German Legal Science,” in Robert W. Gordon, ed., The Legacy of Oliver (Page
xxxii).