A mutual agreement or understanding. The term comes from contract law, where it describes the intentions of the parties to a contract. The legal sense dates from the mid-1800s. Jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes refuted the idea that such an agreement is basic to a contract, writing in 1897 in the Harvard Law Review that a meeting of the minds was really a fiction. Nevertheless, the term has been adopted for various kinds of agreement. For example, a headline in an online journal, Technorati, for an article by Scott Hewitt about a meeting between President Obama and Republican senate minority leader Mitch McConnell read, “Is an Obama-McConnell Meeting of the Minds an Omen for November?” (August 6, 2010).