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Who really said it

The Common Law Consists of About Half A Dozen Obvious Propositions, But Unfortunately …

Credited to Lord Sterndale — a remark recalled, never written down William Pickford, 1st Baron Sterndale 1848–1923 · English barrister and judge; Master of the Rolls from 1919
Disputed In copyright

The line is nowhere in Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s The Common Law (1881), and no evidence connects him to it. Its earliest printed text is a paper read by Judge H. C. Dowdall on 26 September 1931 and published in 1932, where the sentence sits in quotation marks with no speaker named; four months later Dowdall wrote to The Times naming Lord Sterndale as the man he had heard say it. Sterndale never published it himself, so the wording is Dowdall’s recollection of a remark, not a text.

Last verified 7 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed wording — copy with the correction

“The Common Law Consists of About Half A Dozen Obvious Propositions, But Unfortunately …” credited to Lord Sterndale (William Pickford, 1848–1923) by Judge H. C. Dowdall, letter to The Times (London), 26 January 1932. Earliest printed text: Dowdall, "The Psychological Origins of Law," Report of the Centenary Meeting, British Association for the Advancement of Science (London, 1932), p. 449. Not Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. — verified at Quotle.info · Verbatim: “The common law consists of about half a dozen obvious propositions, but unfortunately nobody knows what they are.”

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by the Estate of Judge H. C. Dowdall and the British Association for the Advancement of Science, publisher of the 1932 Report, in the United States only — the text is public domain in the UK, its country of first publication, since 1 January 2026). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

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Provenance

Where the sentence first appears in print

Earliest printed text
Report of the Centenary Meeting, British Association for the Advancement of Science
Paper
“The Psychological Origins of Law” by His Honour Judge Dowdall, read Saturday 26 September 1931; Sectional Transactions H, page 449. Volume published London: Office of the British Association, 1932.
Attributed by
Judge Dowdall, letter to The Times (London), 26 January 1932, page 8 — naming Lord Sterndale as the speaker.
Not found in
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Common Law (1881) — full text searched, no match.

Man’s rational nature looks to find some presiding genius or logical principle behind, and giving consistency to, these decisions—a god of justice, a law of nature, etc. But such is not easily found even in these days, and the discovery is fragmentary. ‘The English common law consists of half a dozen obvious propositions, but unfortunately no one knows what they are.’ 1932 · earliest printed text

Dowdall enclosed the sentence in single quotation marks and named no speaker here. The name arrived four months later, in his letter to The Times of 26 January 1932, which gives the now-familiar wording: “Lord Sterndale once said, ‘The common law consists of about half a dozen obvious propositions, but unfortunately nobody knows what they are.’”

Scanned conference report
Report of the Centenary Meeting, BAAS (London, 1932)
Quote Investigator’s investigation of the saying

How the attribution travelled

  • 26 September 1931 — the sentence enters print, anonymously. Judge Dowdall reads “The Psychological Origins of Law” at the Centenary Meeting of the British Association. He quotes the line but names no one. The volume appears the following year: scanned Report, page 449 ↗.
  • 26 January 1932 — the name is supplied. Dowdall writes to The Times: “Lord Sterndale once said…” He recalls hearing it while Pickford read a case, adds that it was “not long after he had taken silk,” and asks whether any reader ever heard him say something similar. Transcribed by Quote Investigator ↗.
  • 1936 — the line loosens into folklore. The British Association’s report prints an unattributed version: the common law “maliciously described” as deducible from “a very few simple and universally accepted principles, though no one knows what they are.” See the 1936 Report ↗.
  • Holmes was never in the chain. His The Common Law predates all of this by fifty years and contains none of the wording; the full text is searchable at Project Gutenberg ↗.
In copyright

Lord Sterndale, who died in 1923, never published the line, so there is no earlier printing to point to. The earliest fixed text is Judge Dowdall’s, and the volume’s own title page reads “Office of the British Association, Burlington House, London, W.1 — 1932”. In the United States that 1932 first publication is still protected: as of 2026 the public domain reaches works published before 1931, so the source text is treated here as in copyright. In the United Kingdom, its country of first publication, copyright runs for the author’s life plus 70 years — Dowdall died in 1955, so his text entered the public domain on 1 January 2026, and the publisher’s separate right in the typographical arrangement (25 years) lapsed in 1957. The Times letter of the same year is likewise a 1932 publication. Quoting a single sentence for commentary and attribution is a different matter from the status of the volume itself.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Three names, and why only one of them is supported

This quip travels under several names. Holmes is the one the evidence rules out most cleanly — but the credit that survives is itself second-hand, and worth stating with the same honesty.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Not his

Holmes’s 1881 treatise is titled The Common Law, which pulls any epigram about it toward his name — but no source we could find actually credits him with this one, and the sentence is not in the book. A search of the complete Project Gutenberg text ↗ returns no instance of “half a dozen,” “obvious propositions,” “nobody knows” or “no one knows.” He argued the opposing case — that the law is not deducible from a few principles — and Quote Investigator ↗, which traced the saying, does not list him among the candidates.

Judge H. C. Dowdall Reporter, not author

Dowdall (1868–1955, circuit judge for Lancashire 1921–40, per the Henson Journals biographical index ↗) put the sentence in single quotation marks and named nobody when his paper was read on 26 September 1931. The printed wording is therefore his transcription of something he had heard, and the volume that carries it is the 1932 Centenary Report ↗, not anything Sterndale wrote.

Lord Sterndale (William Pickford) Credited, from memory

The whole basis is Dowdall’s letter to The Times of 26 January 1932, in which he recalls Pickford saying it while reading a case Dowdall had looked up for him, “not long after he had taken silk” — and Pickford took silk in 1893 ↗. Sterndale had been dead since 1923, and Dowdall closed by asking readers whether any of them had ever heard him make a similar observation. Quote Investigator ↗ adopts the Sterndale credit while keeping “Anonymous?” and “Apocryphal?” on its own list of possibilities.

The earliest documented text is Judge Dowdall’s, printed in 1932 and credited by him to Lord Sterndale — a remark recalled from conversation, never written down by the man it is credited to. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. is connected to it by nothing but the title of his book: Quote Investigator ↗.

Context

The joke is about legal reasoning — and Holmes made the serious version

The gag only works if you already believe the common law ought to reduce to a handful of principles. Dowdall used it that way: his 1931 paper argued that human beings look for “some presiding genius or logical principle” behind accumulated judicial decisions, and that such a thing “is not easily found even in these days, and the discovery is fragmentary.” The quip is the punchline to that paragraph, not a stand-alone aphorism.

Holmes made the same complaint without the joke. The opening page of The Common Law ↗ insists the law “cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.” That overlap, plus a book title identical to the quip’s subject, is the obvious reason a witticism about the common law drifts toward the most famous name attached to the phrase — an observation, not a documented transmission.

‘The English common law consists of half a dozen obvious propositions, but unfortunately no one knows what they are.’

A looser variant surfaced in 1936

Five years after Dowdall’s paper, the same British Association series printed an unattributed reworking in A. W. Wolters’s paper on the patterns of experience: the English common law “has been maliciously described as consisting of a vast body of decisions and pronouncements, all readily deducible from a very few simple and universally accepted principles, though no one knows what they are.” No speaker is named, and the numeral has vanished — a sign the line was already circulating as folklore within the same organisation that first printed it. Confirmed in the scanned 1936 Report ↗.

The wording most people quote today — “about half a dozen … nobody knows what they are” — is the Times letter form, not the 1931 printed form, which reads “The English common law consists of half a dozen obvious propositions, but unfortunately no one knows what they are.” Both are Dowdall’s renderings, four months apart.

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Quote Origin: The Common Law Consists of About Half A Dozen Obvious Propositionsquoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation. Traces the saying to Judge Dowdall’s 1931 paper and 1932 Times letter, transcribes both, and concludes it was ascribed to Lord Sterndale — with ‘Anonymous?’ and ‘Apocryphal?’ still open in its headline.
Report of the Centenary Meeting, BAAS (London, 1932)archive.org

The scanned primary volume. Dowdall’s “The Psychological Origins of Law” appears in Sectional Transactions H, with the quoted sentence on page 449.
Report of the Annual Meeting 1936, BAASarchive.org

Carries the 1936 unattributed variant — the common law “maliciously described” as deducible from a few principles “though no one knows what they are.”
The Common Law — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1881)gutenberg.org

Full searchable text of the book Holmes is credited from. It contains no instance of “half a dozen,” “obvious propositions,” “nobody knows” or “no one knows.”
William Pickford, 1st Baron Sterndaleen.wikipedia.org

Biography of the man Dowdall named: born 1 October 1848, called to the Bar 1874, silk 1893, High Court 1907, peerage 1918, Master of the Rolls 1919, died 17 August 1923.
Common law — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote’s common-law page does not carry this saying at all; the Holmes lines it does source are “a brooding omnipresence in the sky” and “the life of the law has not been logic.”

The man the remark is credited to

Who Lord Sterndale was

William Pickford, 1st Baron Sterndale

1848–1923 · English barrister and judge; Master of the Rolls from 1919

William Pickford was called to the Bar in 1874, took silk in 1893, and was appointed to the High Court in 1907. He was raised to the peerage as Baron Sterndale in 1918 and became Master of the Rolls in 1919, holding that office until his death in 1923. He published no collection of sayings and left no written text of the line credited to him — it survives only because a barrister who says he heard him utter it, while Pickford was reading a case the younger man had looked up for him, wrote it down and sent it to The Times in 1932.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest documented text

H. C. Dowdall, “The Psychological Origins of Law,” in Report of the Centenary Meeting, British Association for the Advancement of Science, London—1931, September 23–30, Sectional Transactions H (Anthropology), paper read 26 September 1931 (London: Office of the British Association, 1932), 449. Attribution to Lord Sterndale: Judge Dowdall, letter, “Lord Sterndale on Common Law,” The Times (London), 26 January 1932, 8, as transcribed by Quote Investigator.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The Common Law Consists of About Half A Dozen Obvious Propositions, But Unfortunately …’?” Last verified 7 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-common-law-consists-of-about-half-a-dozen-obvious/

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