“Consistently gripping.… [I]t’s possessed of a zest and omnivorous curiosity that reflects the boundless energy of its subject.” —Steve Donoghue, Christian Science Monitor Oliver Wendell Holmes escaped death twice as a young Union officer in the Civil War. He lived ever after with unwavering moral courage, unremitting scorn for dogma, and an insatiable intellectual curiosity. During his nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, he wrote a series of opinions that would prove prophetic in securing freedom of speech, protecting the rights of criminal defendants, and ending the Court’s reactionary resistance to social and economic reforms. As a pioneering legal scholar, Holmes revolutionized the understanding of common law. As an enthusiastic friend, he wrote thousands of letters brimming with an abiding joy in fighting the good fight. Drawing on many previously unpublished letters and records, Stephen Budiansky offers the fullest portrait yet of this pivotal American figure.

"On his retirement from the Supreme Court at the age of 90 in 1932, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was celebrated as few judges have ever been, beloved and revered as a national treasure. Holmes's influence, magnified into legend by the attention he has continued to receive, has helped to constitute the identity of the legal profession, the conception of the judicial function, and the role of the public intellectual in modern American culture." "The present collection of seven essays attempts to view Holmes's work apart from the restricted framework supplied by traditional jurisprudence by reassessing Holmes as an intellectual, a legal theorist, and an iconic public figure and culture hero. Each essay adds something new and distinctive to the scholarly controversies that have surrounded Holmes for over a century." "J. W. Burrow begins the volume by looking at Holmes's relations to various strands of Victorian social thought. she next three essays approach, each from a different angle, the problem of Holmes's relationship to formalism or classical orthodoxy in legal thought. Morton Horwitz provides a sweeping reassessment of the development of Holmes's legal thinking between the early period of the 1870's and 1880's and "The Path of the Law" in 1897. Mathias Reimann presents the first thorough exploration of Holmes's use - misuse, more often - of German philosophy, notably his discrediting, in The Common Law, of the legacy of Kant and Hegel. Stephen Diamond approaches Holmes's jurisprudence and his broader social and personal views by another original pathway, his legal opinions in taxation cases and his private views on taxation." "The final three essays consider Holmes as a man of letters and "representative" man of the American scene, both as he created himself and as he was created by others. Robert Ferguson shows how Holmes deliberately went about the work of fashioning the public persona of a judge. Peter Gibian shows how Holmes's construction of his public style was formed as a deliberate reaction against that of his famous father, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. The final essay by David Hollinger has a dual purpose: to ask what Holmes meant by the "scientific way of looking at the world" and to discover how Holmes came to be such a hero to liberal Jewish intellectuals like Felix Frankfurter and Harold J. Laski."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Brings together distinguished legal scholars to examine a seminal work in American legal theory.

Albert Alschuler's study of Holmes is very different from other books about him, in that it is an exercise in debunking him.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, is considered by many to be the most influential American jurist. The voluminous literature devoted to his writings and legal thought, however, is diverse and inconsistent. In this study, Frederic R. Kellogg follows Holmes's intellectual path from his early writings through his judicial career. He offers a fresh perspective that addresses the views of Holmes's leading critics and explains his relevance to the controversy over judicial activism and restraint. Holmes is shown to be an original legal theorist who reconceived common law as a theory of social inquiry and who applied his insights to constitutional law. From his empirical and naturalist perspective on law, with its roots in American pragmatism, emerged Holmes's distinctive judicial and constitutional restraint. Kellogg distinguishes Holmes from analytical legal positivism and contrasts him with a range of thinkers.