Content area
Full text
The Hidden Holmes: His Theory of Torts in History. By David Rosenberg. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. xiv, 280 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-674-39002-4.)
Few historical reputations have experienced a more rapid transformation in this century than that of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Supreme Court justice and legal philosopher, a hero to turn-of-the-century Progressives and legal realists who since the 1960s has come under sustained criticism from a later generation of scholars for both his jurisprudential and his social views. While realists and New Dealers stressed and praised Holmes's assault on legal formalism, his posture of judicial restraint in cases involving maximum hours and minimum wages, and his vigorous defense of the First Amendment beginning with Abrams v. United States (1919), more recent critics have focused on the justice's continuing addiction to formalistic categories, his abiding skepticism of most redistributive social reforms, and his frequent indifference to individual rights beyond the speech and press paradigm.
David Rosenberg, a professor of law at Harvard, now joins the battle over Holmes's legacy and reputation with this new and intellectually challenging book on the latter's theory and contribution to the American law of torts. Rosenberg's major hypothesis is simply stated. Contrary to...