A point Holmes recurred to was that many of the new rules that had evolved reflected efforts by courts to work out a balance between competing interests in society and establish standards of conduct so as to avoid conflict. That meant the law was as much about setting policy as doing justice in individual cases: "In substance the growth of the law is legislative," he insisted. To American legal theorists, that was an especially heretical idea. They had been adamant that judges were not "legislators": that was a power reserved to the democratic will of the people, expressed through their elected representatives.
-Stephen Budiansky, Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas
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