About the Author

G. Edward White is University Professor and John B. Minor Professor of Law and History at the University of Virginia. A noted legal scholar, his books have won several awards, including a Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association in 1983, for Earl Warren, and the James Willard Hurst Prize of the Law and Society Association in 1990, for The Marshall Court and Cultural Change.

Reviews

'White produces a quite remarkable book. The most remarkable feature of this study is its detail ... a study, which, for all its detail and complexity, never fails to engage the reader--is an incredible achievement. Rarely do biographies come as good as this'. Law Quarterly Review

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.)