Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self

In this thorough and insightful scholarly biography, White ( Earl Warren ) explores the linked life and work of legendary scholar and jurist Holmes (1841-1935). Son of a famed literary father and product of a privileged Boston Brahmin upbringing, Holmes entered the legal profession having lost his youthful romanticism in the Civil War when he was wounded three times. Drawing on prodigious research, White closely analyzes Holmes's legal scholarship, finding a tension between his subject's reliance on both experience and logic in his classic, The Common Law . The author also dissects Holmes's Supreme Court opinions, describing how his reputation grew and suggesting that Holmes's famous rhetoric on free speech (``every idea is an incitement'') was memorable but obscured philosophical contradictions, perhaps because his changing ideas on free speech had less to do with the consistent evolution of legal doctrine than with the influence of certain Washington intellectuals. Holmes's wife Fanny supplied domesticity, but the couple never had children; and Holmes's one great extra-marital romance with the Anglo-Irish aristocrat Clare Castletown was epistolary only. His self-control and his ambition, White suggests, allowed Holmes to concentrate on his work. That work, along with Holmes's stature as a ``figure of public romance,'' will long stimulate students of history. Photos not seen by PW. (Nov.)