Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr

'The Common Law' is a book that was written by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., 21 years before Holmes became an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. The book is about common law in the United States, including torts, property, contracts, and crime. It is written as a series of lectures. One of the most famous aphorisms to be drawn from this book occurs on the first page: "The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience."

“Consistently gripping.… [I]t’s possessed of a zest and omnivorous curiosity that reflects the boundless energy of its subject.” —Steve Donoghue, Christian Science Monitor Oliver Wendell Holmes escaped death twice as a young Union officer in the Civil War. He lived ever after with unwavering moral courage, unremitting scorn for dogma, and an insatiable intellectual curiosity. During his nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, he wrote a series of 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. As an enthusiastic friend, he wrote thousands of letters brimming with an abiding joy in fighting the good fight. Drawing on many previously unpublished letters and records, Stephen Budiansky offers the fullest portrait yet of this pivotal American figure.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, is considered by many to be the most influential American jurist. The voluminous literature devoted to his writings and legal thought, however, is diverse and inconsistent. In this study, Frederic R. Kellogg follows Holmes's intellectual path from his early writings through his judicial career. He offers a fresh perspective that addresses the views of Holmes's leading critics and explains his relevance to the controversy over judicial activism and restraint. Holmes is shown to be an original legal theorist who reconceived common law as a theory of social inquiry and who applied his insights to constitutional law. From his empirical and naturalist perspective on law, with its roots in American pragmatism, emerged Holmes's distinctive judicial and constitutional restraint. Kellogg distinguishes Holmes from analytical legal positivism and contrasts him with a range of thinkers.

With Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Legal Logic, Frederic R. Kellogg examines the early diaries, reading, and writings of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841–1935) to assess his contribution to both legal logic and general logical theory. Through discussions with his mentor Chauncey Wright and others, Holmes derived his theory from Francis Bacon’s empiricism, influenced by recent English debates over logic and scientific method, and Holmes’s critical response to John Stuart Mill’s 1843 A System of Logic. Conventional legal logic tends to focus on the role of judges in deciding cases. Holmes recognized input from outside the law—the importance of the social dimension of legal and logical induction: how opposing views of “many minds” may converge. Drawing on analogies from the natural sciences, Holmes came to understand law as an extended process of inquiry into recurring problems. Rather than vagueness or contradiction in the meaning or application of rules, Holmes focused on the relation of novel or unanticipated facts to an underlying and emergent social problem. Where the meaning and extension of legal terms are disputed by opposing views and practices, it is not strictly a legal uncertainty, and it is a mistake to expect that judges alone can immediately resolve the larger issue.

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

Albert Alschuler's study of Holmes is very different from other books about him, in that it is an exercise in debunking him.

"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."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

A Supreme Court justice for four decades, Holmes is renowned for his learning, judgment, and eloquence, as reflected in this compilation of 26 of his papers and addresses.