• vegging out (watching TV) is a hindrance to memory retention/improvement
• try meditation

Holmes – The Path of the Law

• Intro to 19th C. legal realism
• knowledge of the law requires looking at it as a bad man would
• focus on the practical consequences (what the law does, not what it says)
• the limiting principle of legal realism (how much extra-textual knowledge one should have) is where the public force will be applied

2 fallacies:

1. confounding of morality & law

• contract law - formalism (offer & acceptance) v. realism (damages)
• separate moral stock from legal talk
• isolate the language of the law

1. the notion that the only force at work in the development of law is logic

• Logic results from the human need to comprehend our environment
• we impose logic on the structure of the universe
• logic is a human frailty
• The language of judicial decisions is that of logic
• Holmes uses it as term of derogation in his opinions
• Any proposition can have a logical form
• To say that legal consequences occur as deduction from axioms is wrong

• The sound of the new century: “But certainty is generally illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.
• Creativity emerges from focus