is a book of essays with each contributor addressing a different aspect of Holmess legacy, These essays are thorough works, delving into areas that illuminate and provide nuance and background
on Oliver Wendell Holmes, his approach, and his work,
The essays cover Holmess intellectual milieu, his approach to law and the constitution, his classic book “The Common Law”, his views on taxation and obligation, the relationship with his father Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
, and his followers and how they created the “great man” that we know today,
Just like the short biography of Holmes that Ive read recently, I developed a more nuanced view of Holmes, his thought, and his legacy, For a long time, I held the view that Holmes was a progressive and placed him in the legal positivist tradition and that was that, I wasnt totally wrong. And while I still disagree with Holmes on the law and legal positivism, there was so much more nuance to Holmess positions than I expected, Thats a failing on my part,
With regards to era he was in, America transitioned from a pastoral nation to an increasingly urbanized and industrialized nation, There was a tension in the law, and the idea of custom was held to influence the law in such a way that the legal profession, as was suggested, did not need to use the law to address the social changes.
Holmes, in his early writings, seemed willing to accept the “custom” argument, However, custom seemed to fail, The socioeconomic institutions were changing so rapidly that custom could not adapt sufficiently quickly to address the strife and unrest, So, Holmes abandoned the idea of custom in the law,
Holmes seemed to be unique in his approach to law so much so that he has been claimed by many schools of thought, The positivists, the realists, the pragmatists, and others all have traced themselves back to Holmes, I had placed Holmes in the positivist camp, Its hard to put him in any single one, but he probably can be put largely in the realest camp more than any,
But despite his purported progressive bone fides, Holmes was not a true believer in progressive reformation, He thought that many progressive reforms would be ineffective, He thought that the economics behind the reforms were wrong, He thought that the plight of “the crowd” his term for the people was not that bad, that their consumption was at the same levels of the rich.
He had some level of admiration for entrepreneurs and rich businessmen, However, his legal views trumped his economic views, Regardless of whether or not Holmes liked a particular argument or legislation before him, he upheld the law if it was validly enacted, And because he worked during the progressive era when most new legislation was, well, progressive, he upheld a lot of progressive legislation despite thinking most of it was bunk.
So his progressive legacy was by chance, Holmes would just have soon upheld “conservative” legislation,
This book is not to be taken lightly, It is accessible but is not written for a lay audience, I am happy I took the time to read it, It is full of information about Holmes and his era, and the reader will be richer for it,
On his retirement from the Supreme Court at the age ofin, 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's and's and "The Path of the Law" in.
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,