Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner SelfOxford University Press, 1995 M11 16 - 648 páginas 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. |
Contenido
3 | |
7 | |
49 | |
Friendships Companions and Attachments 18641882 | 87 |
Coming to Maturity Early Legal Scholarship | 112 |
The Common Law | 148 |
An All Round View of the Law 18821902 | 196 |
Travel and Romance | 225 |
Recognition | 354 |
The Supreme Court 19171931 The Progressive Judge | 378 |
The Supreme Court 19171931 Free Speech | 412 |
Aging | 455 |
A Concluding Assessment | 476 |
Holmes Secretaries | 489 |
NOTES | 491 |
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY | 591 |
The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts | 253 |
The Supreme Court 19031916 | 298 |
INDEX | 611 |
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Términos y frases comunes
Abrams Amendment analysis appeared argued argument Boston Brandeis Chafee Chapter Civil Clare Castletown clear and present Common Carriers Common Law constitutional contemporaries criminal law Debs December decisions diary entry dissent Donald Hiss due process duty early essay experience fact Fanny Felix Frankfurter free speech friends Frohwerk Harold Laski Harvard Law School Holmes Papers Holmes to Clare Holmes to Laski Holmes to Pollock Holmes wrote Holmes-Laski Letters Holmes-Pollock Letters Holmeses intellectual interest issues James James Bradley Thayer judge July June jurisprudence jurisprudential jury Justice Holmes labor lectures legislation Lewis Einstein liability Lochner logic March Massachusetts Nina Gray Oliver Wendell Holmes opinions persons philosophical present danger principle question quoted reason Regiment relationship Roosevelt Schenck scholarly scholarship seems social statute supra note Supreme Court Supreme Judicial Court t]he Taft Thayer theory thought tort Touched With Fire writing
Pasajes populares
Página 149 - The life of the law has not been logic : it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed.
Página 438 - Without doubt, it denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint but also the right of the individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and generally to enjoy those privileges long recognized . . . as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.
Página 149 - ... intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellowmen, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.
Página 331 - Great cases like hard cases make bad law. For great cases are called great, not. by reas'on of their real importance in shaping the law of the future, but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment.
Página 464 - The work is done." But just as one says that, the answer comes: "The race is over, but the work never is done while the power to work remains.
Página 288 - One of the eternal conflicts out of which life is made up is that between the effort of every man to get the most he can for his services, and that of society, disguised under the name of 'capital,' to get his services for the least possible return.
Página 402 - We are in danger of forgetting that a strong public desire to improve the public condition is not enough to warrant achieving the desire by a shorter cut than the constitutional way of paying for the change.
Página 570 - The commerce power is not confined in its exercise to the regulation of commerce among the states. It extends to those activities intrastate which so affect interstate commerce, or the exertion of the power of Congress over it, as to make regulation of them appropriate means to the attainment of a legitimate end, the effective execution of the granted power to regulate interstate commerce.
Página 402 - The protection of private property in the Fifth Amendment presupposes that it is wanted for public use, but provides that it shall not be taken for such use without compensation.