Justice oliver Wendell Holmes was an associate justice of the US supreme court. He wrote in his landmark article the path of law which appeared in harvad law review (1897) "the prophecles of what the court will do in fact and nothing more pretentious are what I mean by the law" in making this statement, Holmes was suggesting that the meaning of any written law is determined by the individual judgement interpreting them and until a judge has weighed in a legal issue, the law is ultimately little more than an exercise in trying to guess the way a judge will rule in a case, Holmes explains, the life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The law embodies the story of a nations development through many centuries and it cannot be dealt with as if contained only the axioms and collolaries of a book of mathematics, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr (the common law, 1881)