Essential Holmes

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., has been called the greatest jurist and legal scholar in the history of the English-speaking world. In this collection of his speeches, opinions, and letters, Richard Posner reveals the fullness of Holmes' achievements as judge, historian, philosopher, and master of English style. Thematically arranged, the volume covers a rich variety of subjects from aging and death to themes in politics, personalities, and law. Posner's substantial introduction firmly places this wealth of material in its proper biographical and historical context. "A first-rate prose stylist, [Holmes] was perhaps the most quotable of all judges, as this ably edited volume shows."—Washington Post Book World "Brilliantly edited, lucidly organized, and equipped with a compelling introduction by Judge Posner, [this book] is one of the finest single-volume samplers of any author's work I have seen. . . . Posner has fully captured the acrid tang of him in this masterly anthology."—Terry Teachout, National Review "Excellent. . . . A worthwhile contribution to current American political/legal discussions."—Library Journal "The best source for the reader who wants a first serious acquaintance with Holmes."—Thomas C. Grey, New York Review of Books

This is the first anthology of Oliver Wendell Holmes's writings, speeches, and opinions concerning freedom of expression. Prepared by a noted free speech scholar, the book contains eight original essays designed to situate Holmes's works in historical and biographical context. The volume is enriched by extensive commentaries concerning its many entries, which consist of letters, speeches, book excerpts, articles, state court opinions, and U.S. Supreme Court opinions.

A concise yet life-transforming work that will help many people move past the crippling fear that has stopped them from living their destined life. Does fear stop you from living your life to the fullest? In Living Without Fear, Holmes brilliantly navigates the reader through and away from anxiety, despair, and stress and toward the path to a richer experience in living. Learn to think constructively and creatively and to liberate yourself, finally, from all limitations so you can lead a life of greater health, happiness, and abundance. Living Without Fear is your guide to a life of peaceful selfactualization, free from the fear of what you don't want in your life, as well as from the fear of not receiving what you do want. This courageous, luminary book puts the power back into the reader's hands. Here is the end of fear.

l: Aging and Death 2: Joie de Vivre 3: Culture and Personalities4: The Life Struggle 5: Metaphysics 6: The Social Struggle 7: The Activity of Law 8: The Common Law 9: Interpretation 10: Liberty Index

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.

This bold book challenges a contemporary consensus on the titanic figure of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes is the acknowledged source of twentieth-century tort law, but David Rosenberg takes sharp issue with the current portrayal of Holmes as a legal formalist in torts who opposed the notion of strict liability and dogmatically advocated a universal rule of negligence, primarily to subsidize industrial development. Marshaling the evidence found in Holmes' classic The Common Law and other writings, the author reveals that the opposite was the case, and, in the process, raises troubling questions about the present state of legal scholarship. It was Holmes who founded the modern conception and justification of strict liability. He envisioned an expansive role for strict liability to augment the negligence rule in preventing and redressing injury from industrial activity. This recovery of Holmes' theory of torts provides new insights into the nature of the jurisprudence that launched the American legal realist movement, and also overturns standard interpretations of the history of tort law. Rejecting the prevailing view that either strict liability or negligence reigned exclusively, Holmes and his contemporaries reconciled the existence of both rules, and advocated reforms of tort law to protect society from the unprecedented hazards of industrial life. The parallel drawn by the book between their response and ours in grappling with the novel problem of mass torts confirms Holmes' belief in the adaptive genius of the common law.

'Pragmatic Modernism' traces an alternative strain of modernism influenced by pragmatist philosophy and characterized by its commitment to gradualism, continuity, and habit rather than spectacular events and radical rupture.