Oliver Wendell Holmes : a life in war, law, and ideas

by Stephen Budiansky

Hardcover, 2019

Status

Available

Genres

Politics, Government, Law and Public Policy

Publication

New York : W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.

Description

Oliver Wendell Holmes twice escaped death as a young Union officer in the Civil War when musket balls missed his heart and spinal cord by a fraction of an inch at the Battles of Ball's Bluff and Antietam. He lived ever after with unwavering moral courage, unremitting scorn for dogma, and an insatiable intellectual curiosity. Named to the Supreme Court by Theodore Roosevelt at age sixty-one, he served for nearly three decades, writing a series of famous, eloquent, and often dissenting 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 by showing how the law always evolved to meet the changing needs of society. As an enthusiastic friend and indefatigable correspondent, he wrote thousands of personal letters brimming with humorous philosophical insights, trenchant comments on the current scene, and an abiding joy in fighting the good fight. Drawing on many previously unpublished letters and records, Stephen Budiansky's definitive biography offers the fullest portrait yet of this pivotal American figure, whose zest for life, wit, and intellect left a profound legacy in law and Constitutional rights, and who was an inspiring example of how to lead a meaningful life in a world of uncertainty and upheaval.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member lanewillson

In his life, he met Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and FDR called on Justice Holmes at his home. Known as the "Great Dissenter," Justice Holmes frequently used his dissenting opinions as road maps to reversing many past inequalities. However, this great mind and brave heart, he was twice near

mortally wounded during the Civil War, was also involved in some of the twentieth century's most heinous decisions. The best example Buck v Bell, Justice Holmes wrote the court's decision to allow compulsory sterilization of the "feeble-minded." Justice Holmes could be the poster-boy for the American Century, raised on the high ideals and aspirations of a democratic republic, but refusing to let go of much of the past's repugnant injustice.

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LibraryThing member dgk53

This is the best biography I have read since "Hemingway's Boat". Great read!

LibraryThing member Schmerguls

5762 Oliver Wendell Holmes A Life in War, Law, and Ideas By Stephen Budiansky (read 3 Nov 2021) This book, published in 2019, is an elegant work, telling in great detail Holmes' time and wounds in the Civil War, his time as a lawyer and judge of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, and on the U.S.

Supreme Court. He was born 8 March 1841, the son of the author of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (read by me on 5 Dec 1944), and served in the Civil War from 1862 to 1865, was seriously wounded twice, practiced law till appointed to the Massachusetts high court, and in 1902 was appointed by Teddy Roosevelt to the United States Supreme Court, where he served till 1932. He died in 1935. This book gets better and better and by he time I finished it I was really finding it a most worthwhile book, Back on June 9, 1944, I read Catherine Drinker Bowen's biography of Holmes with much appreciation but since then I have gone to law school and therein not only learned of many of Holmes' fine opinions on the Court but also leaned of his flawed views, such as his horrendous opinion in Buck v. Bell, a case much admired by Hitler and now viewed as one of Holmes' worst decisions. But many of the dissents by Holmes have now become, fortunately, the majority view, especially in the areas of free speech and of legislative power.

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