Max Radin

Law as Logic and Experience Max Radin

"The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience." --OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR. "Max Radin is the rare and finished product of our American legal system. He is skilled in the semantics of the law. But unlike some legal scholars, and some judges too, he does not use semantics to make law a facile thing to fit the idiosyncrasies of the author or to satisfy the moods of the moment. The law which he fashions is flavored with an earthy quality of function and practicality. He is quick to sense the enduring values of the democratic system and to see the law as the vehicle for their perpetuation." -- WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS, 36 California Law Review 163 1947-1948 "Mr. Radin is too good a logician to accept the popular antithesis between logic and experience as contraries (white and black) or as contradictories (white and not white). Rather, logic and experience are viewed as divergent directions in analysis. The shape of anything that lies within the field of law may be described, therefore, in terms of distances from 'our ordinate of logic and our abscissa of experience.' Upon this framework, Mr. Radin proceeds to analyse the various compounds of logic and experience that constitute law, evidence, arbitration, punishment, and justice." --FELIX S. COHEN, 54 Harvard Law Review 711 1940-1941 MAX RADIN [1880-1950] received his LL. B. from New York University in 1902 and his Ph. D. from Columbia University in 1909. He was a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and UC-Hastings School of Law and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. In 1940 he was the Storrs Lecturer at Yale Law School. He served on the Commission of Uniform States Laws, California, from 1941-1948. A prolific author, his works include The Legislation of the Greeks and Romans on Corporations (1909), Jews Among the Greeks and Romans (1916). Handbook of Roman Law (1927), Trial of Jesus of Nazareth (1931), Handbook of Anglo-American Legal History (1936), The Law and Mr. Smith (1938).