Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas

Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas
Author: Stephen Budiansky
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 737
Release: 2019-05-28
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0393634736

“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 Drawing on many previously unpublished letters and records, Stephen Budiansky offers the fullest portrait yet of this pivotal American figure.

Law Without Values

Law Without Values
Author: Albert W. Alschuler
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2000
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780226015217

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