Taming the Past and the image that graces its cover are meant to call to mind the cave-dwelling dragon of which Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke in his famously iconoclastic 1897 vocational address The Path of the Law. While the speech is most commonly associated with “our friend the bad man” and the prediction theory of law, Bob Gordon redirects our attention to what the great jurist had to say about the place of history in “the rational study of the law.” As Gordon reminds us, Holmes assigned history a role that was preliminary and mostly negative, speaking of it as “the first step toward an enlightened skepticism, that is, toward a deliberate reconsideration of the worth of . . . [legal] rules.”

* William Prosser Professor of Law, Professor of History, and Co-director of the Program in Law and History, University of Minnesota.