The Legacy of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

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.