Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas
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 Drawing on many previously unpublished letters and records, Stephen Budiansky offers the fullest portrait yet of this pivotal American figure.
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Budiansky's account shines.--Adam J. White
A lively, accessible book.--Noah Feldman
Discriminating, genial, and admiring.--Brenda Wineapple
Especially consequential.... Budiansky's is now the most engrossing of the major Holmes biographies.--Lincoln Caplan
The longevity and complexity of Holmes's life and judicial philosophy present a formidable challenge to a biographer. Stephen Budiansky has met that challenge in distinguished fashion. Weaving together Holmes's private and public lives with a clarity that reveals what had often seemed obscure in previous biographies, this book also shows how Holmes's experience as a thrice-wounded Civil War officer subtly shaped his social and juridical ideas during the next seventy years.--James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
A lively and informative portrait of the great justice.--Robert C. Post, Sterling Professor of Law, Yale Law School
