Monday, May 19, 2008

Holmes on Law School

This one got me through the first year of law school, i.e., until I figured out that law school was actually fun:

One found oneself plunged into a thick fog of details—in a black and frozen night, in which were no flowers, no spring, no easy joys. Voices of authority warned that in the crush of that ice any craft might sink. One heard Burke saying that law sharpens the mind by narrowing it. One heard in Thackeray of a lawyer bending all the powers of a great mind to a mean profession. One saw that artists and poets shrank from it as from an alien world. One doubted oneself how it could be worthy of the interest of an intelligent mind. And yet one said to oneself, law is human—it is a part of man, and of one world with the rest.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Address, 1897

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