A New Biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr

In these circumstances, Budiansky’s new Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas—coming during the centennial year of Holmes’s most momentous opinion, which was a visionary dissent about free speech—is especially consequential. For 40 years, from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the Great Depression, including Holmes’s time on the Court, a conservative majority (it did not include him) repeatedly struck down federal and state laws regulating social and economic conditions intended to improve the lives of America’s have-nots. But in this centennial year of the 1919 Holmes judicial opinion that redefined the purpose of free speech in American life, it’s illuminating to recall how he became, with Chief Justice John Marshall, one of the two most illustrious justices to serve on the Supreme Court.

Source: harvardmagazine.com