El estudio racional del derecho es todavía en gran medida el estudio de la historia. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

When twenty years ago a vague terror went over the earth and the word socialism began to be heard, I thought and still think that fear was translated into doctrines that had no proper place in the Constitution or the common law. Judges are apt to be naif, simple-minded men, and they need something of Mephistopheles. We too need education in the obvious—to learn to transcend our own convictions and to leave room for much that we hold dear to be done away with short of revolution by the orderly change of law.

Your remark about the “oughts” and system of values in political science leaves me rather cold. If as I think, the values are simply generalizations emotionally expressed, the generalizations are matters for the same science as other observations of fact. If as I sometimes suspect, you believe in some transcendental sanction, I don't. Of course, different people, and especially different races, differ in their values — but those differences are matters of fact and I have no respect for them except my general respect for what exists. Man is an idealizing animal — and expresses his ideals (values) in the conventions of his time. I have very little respect for the conventions in themselves, but respect and generally try to observe those of my own environment as the transitory expression of an eternal fact. . .

There are not infrequent times when a bottle of wine, a good dinner, a girl of some trivial sort can fill the hour for me.