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

Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas PDF Author: Stephen Budiansky
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393634736
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 737

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 Drawing on many previously unpublished letters and records, Stephen Budiansky offers the fullest portrait yet of this pivotal American figure.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas PDF Author: Stephen Budiansky
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393634736
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 737

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Book Description
“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.

Honorable Justice: The Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes

Honorable Justice: The Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes PDF Author: Sheldon Novick
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 573

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Book Description
An eBook edition of this fine biography is now available. The print edition garnered extraordinary praise; a new preface brings this eBook edition up to date. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. aspired to be a poet and philosopher, was wounded in the Civil War, courted aristocratic women, became one of the greatest judges in American history, and lived long enough to give advice to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We see though Holmes’s eyes, and his searching intelligence, almost a century of American history and the slow growth of a new understanding of the Constitution. “An ideal biography for the intelligent general reader... the fascination [Holmes] exerts, a combination of toughness and style, shines through this book.” — The New Yorker “[Novick] is the type of scholar who, though trained in law, asks Harvard’s Arnold Herbarium to identify some leaves pressed into an old love letter... One opens his book with high hopes, and as chapter follows masterly chapter the hopes mature into admiration of author and awe of subject.” — Edmund Morris, The New York Times “The book’s strength lies in its fast-paced vividness of narrative and its steadiness of belief in the wholeness and stature of Holmes as a man... Novick tells Holmes’s story with verve, insight, and a command of his material. Even his footnotes capture the reader.” — Max Lerner, The New Republic “[Holmes’s life] is stuff for great biography and Sheldon M. Novick has given us just that... a work of original and exact scholarship... concise and readable, yet provides enough historical and legal background to enable the nonspecialist to read the book with comprehension and pleasure.” — Hon. Richard A. Posner, The Wall Street Journal

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes PDF Author: G. Edward White
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199880212
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 649

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Book Description
By any measure, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., led a full and remarkable life. He was tall and exceptionally attractive, especially as he aged, with piercing eyes, a shock of white hair, and prominent moustache. He was the son of a famous father (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., renowned for "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table"), a thrice-wounded veteran of the Civil War, a Harvard-educated member of Brahmin Boston, the acquaintance of Longfellow, Lowell, and Emerson, and for a time a close friend of William James. He wrote one of the classic works of American legal scholarship, The Common Law, and he served with distinction on the Supreme Court of the United States. He was actively involved in the Court's work into his nineties. In Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, G. Edward White, the acclaimed biographer of Earl Warren and one of America's most esteemed legal scholars, provides a rounded portrait of this remarkable jurist. We see Holmes's early life in Boston and at Harvard, his ambivalent relationship with his father, and his harrowing service during the Civil War (he was wounded three times, twice nearly fatally, shot in the chest in his first action, and later shot through the neck at Antietam). White examines Holmes's curious, childless marriage (his diary for 1872 noted on June 17th that he had married Fanny Bowditch Dixwell, and the next sentence indicated that he had become the sole editor of the American Law Review) and he includes new information on Holmes's relationship with Clare Castletown. White not only provides a vivid portrait of Holmes's life, but examines in depth the inner life and thought of this preeminent legal figure. There is a full chapter devoted to The Common Law, for instance, and throughout the book, there is astute commentary on Holmes's legal writings. Indeed, White reveals that some of the themes that have dominated 20th-century American jurisprudence--including protection for free speech and the belief that "judges make the law"--originated in Holmes's work. Perhaps most important, White suggests that understanding Holmes's life is crucial to understanding his work, and he continually stresses the connections between Holmes's legal career and his personal life. For instance, his desire to distinguish himself from his father and from the "soft" literary culture of his father's generation drove him to legal scholarship of a particularly demanding kind. White's biography of Earl Warren was hailed by Anthony Lewis on the cover of The New York Times Book Review as "serious and fascinating," and The Los Angeles Times noted that "White has gone beyond the labels and given us the man." In Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, White has produced an equally serious and fascinating biography, one that again goes beyond the labels and gives us the man himself.

The Common Law

The Common Law PDF Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Common law
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description


Law Without Values

Law Without Values PDF Author: Albert W. Alschuler
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226015217
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
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., Legal Theory, and Judicial Restraint

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Legal Theory, and Judicial Restraint PDF Author: Frederic R. Kellogg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521321921
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
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.

The Black Book of Justice Holmes

The Black Book of Justice Holmes PDF Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes (Jr.)
Publisher: Talbot Publishing
ISBN: 9781616195939
Category : Judges
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
"Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935) is one of the most significant figures in American history, both as a judge and as a legal scholar. He was also, without question, one of the most well-read and erudite jurists of his age. Justice Holmes kept his personal notes in a volume that he called the Black Book. For more than 50 years, Holmes filled his Black Book with lists of books he read (including detailed notes on some of them), accounts of his travels, and even observations about flower blooms in Washington, DC, where he served on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932, and where he lived (except for summers at his place in Beverly Farms, MA) - and continued to make entries in his Black Book - until his death in 1935. This volume gives insight into his mind and activities for a half-century. Here the original text is provided in facsimile, with a transcription on facing pages. Additional essays by the editors and other scholars highlight the significance of the Black Book and situate it in jurisprudential and historical context"--

Freedom for the Thought That We Hate

Freedom for the Thought That We Hate PDF Author: Anthony Lewis
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1458758389
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
More than any other people on earth, we Americans are free to say and write what we think. The press can air the secrets of government, the corporate boardroom, or the bedroom with little fear of punishment or penalty. This extraordinary freedom results not from America’s culture of tolerance, but from fourteen words in the constitution: the free expression clauses of the First Amendment.InFreedom for the Thought That We Hate, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Lewis describes how our free-speech rights were created in five distinct areas—political speech, artistic expression, libel, commercial speech, and unusual forms of expression such as T-shirts and campaign spending. It is a story of hard choices, heroic judges, and the fascinating and eccentric defendants who forced the legal system to come face to face with one of America’s great founding ideas.

The Great Dissent

The Great Dissent PDF Author: Thomas Healy
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 9781250058690
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A gripping intellectual history reveals how Oliver Wendell Holmes became a free-speech advocate and established the modern understanding of the First Amendment No right seems more fundamental to American life than freedom of speech. Yet well into the twentieth century that freedom was still an unfulfilled promise, with Americans regularly imprisoned merely for speaking out against government policies. Indeed, free speech as we know it comes less from the First Amendment than from a most unexpected source: Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. A lifelong skeptic, he disdained all individual rights, including the right to express one's political views. But in 1919, it was Holmes who wrote a dissenting opinion that would become the canonical affirmation of free speech in the United States. Why did Holmes change his mind? That question has puzzled historians for almost a century. Now, with the aid of newly discovered letters and confidential memos, Thomas Healy reconstructs in vivid detail Holmes's journey from free-speech opponent to First Amendment hero. It is the story of a remarkable behind-the-scenes campaign by a group of progressives to bring a legal icon around to their way of thinking—and a deeply touching human narrative of an old man saved from loneliness and despair by a few unlikely young friends. Beautifully written and exhaustively researched, The Great Dissent is intellectual history at its best, revealing how free debate can alter the life of a man and the legal landscape of an entire nation.

The Mind and Faith of Justice Holmes

The Mind and Faith of Justice Holmes PDF Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 1412837820
Category : Constitutional law
Languages : en
Pages : 550

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Book Description