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The Justice from Beacon Hill: The Life and Times of Oliver Wendell Holmes
Surveys the life and work of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and describes his influence as the champion of the idea that the law should be flexible enough to adapt to the changes of society
783 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 1991
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 2, 2022
“The usual conflicting currents that complicate human life had been present in [Oliver Wendell] Holmes’s, and he had been battered by simultaneous urges toward intellect and emotion, conformity and rebellion, filial love and competition, fidelity and inconstancy. Made up of the usual human ingredients of ego and id, body and spirit, blood and brain, he had responded to these pressures in the usual way, incorporating idealism and cynicism, indifference and involvement, vanity and modesty, awe and irreverence, liberalism and conservatism, intimacy and distance, insularity and cosmopolitism, savagery and soaring statements of the spirit. He could heap scorn on his secretary for the young man’s improvidence in buying a package of Life Savers…then turn around and treat a troop of his young friends to a bottle of champagne. He could weep over an etching of a poor family’s supper…and in the next breath condemn with all his soul the ‘passion for equality.’ For every lovable quality…an equally disagreeable trait lurked in the shadows. Oliver Wendell Holmes was a complex and often inconsistent man…”
- Liva Baker, The Justice From Beacon Hill: The Life and Times of Oliver Wendell Holmes
Gloried in his own day, Oliver Wendell Holmes has faded somewhat in the American consciousness. An associate justice of the United States Supreme Court for thirty years, he never served as chief justice, denying him the chance to mold the institution in his image. Though he was an eminently quotable writer – if you ever discuss free speech, and mention a fire in a crowded theater, you are citing Holmes – he did not author the Court’s landmark opinions. And while he embodied – and propounded – the view of a modern and flexible constitution, his impact on current legal thinking is an arguable point.
Unfortunately, most of the recognition Holmes gets today is for his infamous line in Buck v. Bell, in which he upheld a Virginia forced sterilization law with the unforgettably cruel line: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
The gradual disappearance of Holmes is too bad, because he lived an extremely interesting life. Born in 1841, he fought in the Civil War; was wounded three times; wrote one of the most famous legal tracts of all time (The Common Law); served on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts; rose to the Supreme Court, where he earned a reputation as a stalwart of the First Amendment; and died in 1935, in a far different world from the one he had entered.
Liva Baker’s massive The Justice From Beacon Hill does well by Holmes, presenting the man in all his complexities and contradictions. Just about the only thing she doesn’t do is make a case for his enduring relevance.
***
The size of The Justice From Beacon Hill (643 page of text) is a function of its ambitions. Baker is determined to let you know everything there is about her subject. At least everything that can reasonably fit between two covers.
Starting with an introductory chapter that beautifully provides an outline of what is to come, Baker then moves onto Holmes’s family history, with a special focus on his father, a well-known (in his own time) doctor and columnist. Throughout, she argues that Holmes’s Boston Brahmin upbringing played a key role in his personality.
Once Baker has created a strong foundation, she recounts Holmes’s eventful life in chronological fashion, doing a nice job of segueing between his private and public selves. Not every aspect gets the same depth, of course, but Baker does a really nice job of transitioning back and forth. While Holmes’s professional life gets the bulk of the study – sometimes on a case-by-case basis – she does not neglect his long marriage to a long-suffering wife; his emotional (though probably not physical) dalliance with Lady Clare Castletown; and the intellectual bonds he forged with writers and thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Adams. Baker also provides lively – if necessarily thumbnail-sized – portraits of the fascinating figures who orbit Holmes’s tale, including Louis Brandeis and John Marshall Harlan, the onetime Kentucky enslaver who wrote the sole dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson.
***
Overall, Baker’s prose is graceful, and does a wonderful job of incorporating the actual words of the participants.
That said, there are periods of inconsistency. The chapters on Holmes in the Civil War, for instance, are confusingly presented (skipping backwards and forward in time), lacking in context, and sometimes factually wrong.
Despite my disappointment with her presentation of Holmes’s military service, Baker somewhat makes up for it by her acute interpretation of what this era meant for his character. During the war, Holmes suffered greatly from anxiety, and his surviving letters are suffused with dread. When he had the opportunity to resign his commission – before the war’s end – he took it. Having survived, however, Holmes retroactively made the war into the greatest experience of his life, making endless speeches (“In our youths, our hearts were touched with fire”) and defining himself in relation to the conflict.
***
Though her entire bibliography consists of tomes on legal history, Baker was not an attorney herself. Nevertheless, she is mostly solid in presenting the facts and meanings of the cases that Holmes worked on. Probably due to the fact that less is known about them, Baker gives only the most superficial look at Holmes’s state court decisions.
Once Holmes gets to the Supreme Court, however, Baker takes the opportunity to dive much deeper. Especially noteworthy is her presentation of the strange and ugly case of Leo Frank, and the series of First Amendment cases spawned by the Sedition Act.
The biggest issue I had with regard to Baker’s handling of Holmes’s cases is that it is not always clear when she is quoting from the opinion itself, or a private letter that Holmes wrote about the opinion. As a lawyer, and a hater of paper cuts, I found it rather annoying to have to continually flip to the endnotes in the back of the book.
***
It is quite easy for a biographer to fall under the sway of the person they are writing about. To Baker’s credit, she is remarkably clear-eyed and even handed in her judgments. She slices away at the notion that Holmes was a progressive, keenly noting that any hint of progressivism (such as occasionally siding with labor over capital) was simply an offshoot of his belief that Congress had the right to pass laws, and it wasn’t the place of the Supreme Court to strike them down just because they did not think them wise.
Baker’s conclusion as to Holmes’s civil rights record is a resounding “mixed.” When it came to protecting black property rights, he was a dismal failure, siding with his brethren in support of the noxious belief that the Fourteenth Amendment (enacted to protect the freedom of the formerly enslaved) was only meant to protect a person’s private property (through the judicially-created “liberty of contract”). When it came to certain fundamental rights, however, such as voting and fair trials, he did much better.
And yes, Baker deals at length with Holmes’s role in the tragedy of Carrie Elizabeth Buck, sterilized by Virginia for being an “imbecile.” The sterilization itself is bad enough; the fact that she was actually of normal intelligence, and had been institutionalized after being raped, is just the scummy rime on this cesspit. Baker does not try to explain the decision away by noting that eugenics was a scientific fad that many otherwise-decent people believed in, and that it had not yet been inextricably tethered to Nazism. Instead, she gives you the space to form your own judgments.
***
“This, they will say, is how to live,” the columnist Walter Lippman wrote of Holmes in 1932. Despite his obvious mistakes, it is a fitting benediction. A glaringly imperfect man, it can probably be said he did more good than harm in his career – and in his life – which is the eminently defensible position that Baker ultimately takes.
***
The Justice From Beacon Hill is excellent, but doesn’t transcend its subject matter. That is to say, if you are not already interested in reading about Oliver Wendell Holmes, I would not recommend it. That is Baker’s one shortcoming. While doing a marvelous job of narrating the ebb and flow of Holmes’s ninety-plus years, she falls a bit short in convincing the reader that he still matters.
- Liva Baker, The Justice From Beacon Hill: The Life and Times of Oliver Wendell Holmes
Gloried in his own day, Oliver Wendell Holmes has faded somewhat in the American consciousness. An associate justice of the United States Supreme Court for thirty years, he never served as chief justice, denying him the chance to mold the institution in his image. Though he was an eminently quotable writer – if you ever discuss free speech, and mention a fire in a crowded theater, you are citing Holmes – he did not author the Court’s landmark opinions. And while he embodied – and propounded – the view of a modern and flexible constitution, his impact on current legal thinking is an arguable point.
Unfortunately, most of the recognition Holmes gets today is for his infamous line in Buck v. Bell, in which he upheld a Virginia forced sterilization law with the unforgettably cruel line: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
The gradual disappearance of Holmes is too bad, because he lived an extremely interesting life. Born in 1841, he fought in the Civil War; was wounded three times; wrote one of the most famous legal tracts of all time (The Common Law); served on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts; rose to the Supreme Court, where he earned a reputation as a stalwart of the First Amendment; and died in 1935, in a far different world from the one he had entered.
Liva Baker’s massive The Justice From Beacon Hill does well by Holmes, presenting the man in all his complexities and contradictions. Just about the only thing she doesn’t do is make a case for his enduring relevance.
***
The size of The Justice From Beacon Hill (643 page of text) is a function of its ambitions. Baker is determined to let you know everything there is about her subject. At least everything that can reasonably fit between two covers.
Starting with an introductory chapter that beautifully provides an outline of what is to come, Baker then moves onto Holmes’s family history, with a special focus on his father, a well-known (in his own time) doctor and columnist. Throughout, she argues that Holmes’s Boston Brahmin upbringing played a key role in his personality.
Once Baker has created a strong foundation, she recounts Holmes’s eventful life in chronological fashion, doing a nice job of segueing between his private and public selves. Not every aspect gets the same depth, of course, but Baker does a really nice job of transitioning back and forth. While Holmes’s professional life gets the bulk of the study – sometimes on a case-by-case basis – she does not neglect his long marriage to a long-suffering wife; his emotional (though probably not physical) dalliance with Lady Clare Castletown; and the intellectual bonds he forged with writers and thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Adams. Baker also provides lively – if necessarily thumbnail-sized – portraits of the fascinating figures who orbit Holmes’s tale, including Louis Brandeis and John Marshall Harlan, the onetime Kentucky enslaver who wrote the sole dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson.
***
Overall, Baker’s prose is graceful, and does a wonderful job of incorporating the actual words of the participants.
That said, there are periods of inconsistency. The chapters on Holmes in the Civil War, for instance, are confusingly presented (skipping backwards and forward in time), lacking in context, and sometimes factually wrong.
Despite my disappointment with her presentation of Holmes’s military service, Baker somewhat makes up for it by her acute interpretation of what this era meant for his character. During the war, Holmes suffered greatly from anxiety, and his surviving letters are suffused with dread. When he had the opportunity to resign his commission – before the war’s end – he took it. Having survived, however, Holmes retroactively made the war into the greatest experience of his life, making endless speeches (“In our youths, our hearts were touched with fire”) and defining himself in relation to the conflict.
***
Though her entire bibliography consists of tomes on legal history, Baker was not an attorney herself. Nevertheless, she is mostly solid in presenting the facts and meanings of the cases that Holmes worked on. Probably due to the fact that less is known about them, Baker gives only the most superficial look at Holmes’s state court decisions.
Once Holmes gets to the Supreme Court, however, Baker takes the opportunity to dive much deeper. Especially noteworthy is her presentation of the strange and ugly case of Leo Frank, and the series of First Amendment cases spawned by the Sedition Act.
The biggest issue I had with regard to Baker’s handling of Holmes’s cases is that it is not always clear when she is quoting from the opinion itself, or a private letter that Holmes wrote about the opinion. As a lawyer, and a hater of paper cuts, I found it rather annoying to have to continually flip to the endnotes in the back of the book.
***
It is quite easy for a biographer to fall under the sway of the person they are writing about. To Baker’s credit, she is remarkably clear-eyed and even handed in her judgments. She slices away at the notion that Holmes was a progressive, keenly noting that any hint of progressivism (such as occasionally siding with labor over capital) was simply an offshoot of his belief that Congress had the right to pass laws, and it wasn’t the place of the Supreme Court to strike them down just because they did not think them wise.
Baker’s conclusion as to Holmes’s civil rights record is a resounding “mixed.” When it came to protecting black property rights, he was a dismal failure, siding with his brethren in support of the noxious belief that the Fourteenth Amendment (enacted to protect the freedom of the formerly enslaved) was only meant to protect a person’s private property (through the judicially-created “liberty of contract”). When it came to certain fundamental rights, however, such as voting and fair trials, he did much better.
And yes, Baker deals at length with Holmes’s role in the tragedy of Carrie Elizabeth Buck, sterilized by Virginia for being an “imbecile.” The sterilization itself is bad enough; the fact that she was actually of normal intelligence, and had been institutionalized after being raped, is just the scummy rime on this cesspit. Baker does not try to explain the decision away by noting that eugenics was a scientific fad that many otherwise-decent people believed in, and that it had not yet been inextricably tethered to Nazism. Instead, she gives you the space to form your own judgments.
***
“This, they will say, is how to live,” the columnist Walter Lippman wrote of Holmes in 1932. Despite his obvious mistakes, it is a fitting benediction. A glaringly imperfect man, it can probably be said he did more good than harm in his career – and in his life – which is the eminently defensible position that Baker ultimately takes.
***
The Justice From Beacon Hill is excellent, but doesn’t transcend its subject matter. That is to say, if you are not already interested in reading about Oliver Wendell Holmes, I would not recommend it. That is Baker’s one shortcoming. While doing a marvelous job of narrating the ebb and flow of Holmes’s ninety-plus years, she falls a bit short in convincing the reader that he still matters.
July 28, 2018
I don't think that the reviews so far on this site do the book justice. It is very well written, and less episodic than most judicial biographies due to the nature of Holmes's judicial philosophy. The author reminds the reader just enough of how one episode in Holmes's life relates to another. An excellent account of a fascinating, imperfect man who bridges the modern world and a world with values and behavioral norms that would be very foreign to most people today.
To say (as another reviewer did) that it has no thesis is a little unfair for two reasons. First, this is a biography, and human lives generally, don't generally have theses. Biographies, by their nature, revolve around facts, dates, events that often occur without adherence to a thesis. But, in case Holmes's life may be said to have followed more theses than most. His commitment to a life of the mind, with particular judicial principals (deference to legislatures regardless of his personal feelings) and the legacy of the Civil War are two such theses that tie the work together more than other judicial biographies.
Another reviewer noted the unpleasant and morally wrong nature of some of Holmes's opinions. There is no denying that, but the author presents those opinions fairly, and explains why Holmes wrote them and why, at the time, judges would author such opinions.
Another reviewer accuses the author of not understanding the concept of standing, although I thought she distinguished it in a passage or two, but I don't remember. I don't think the accusation of lazy intellectual crutches is fair. A few, telling footnotes make clear how thoroughly the author researched this book. If she used some ready adjectives to describe the massive corporations circa 1900, they didn't strike me as out of place.
To say (as another reviewer did) that it has no thesis is a little unfair for two reasons. First, this is a biography, and human lives generally, don't generally have theses. Biographies, by their nature, revolve around facts, dates, events that often occur without adherence to a thesis. But, in case Holmes's life may be said to have followed more theses than most. His commitment to a life of the mind, with particular judicial principals (deference to legislatures regardless of his personal feelings) and the legacy of the Civil War are two such theses that tie the work together more than other judicial biographies.
Another reviewer noted the unpleasant and morally wrong nature of some of Holmes's opinions. There is no denying that, but the author presents those opinions fairly, and explains why Holmes wrote them and why, at the time, judges would author such opinions.
Another reviewer accuses the author of not understanding the concept of standing, although I thought she distinguished it in a passage or two, but I don't remember. I don't think the accusation of lazy intellectual crutches is fair. A few, telling footnotes make clear how thoroughly the author researched this book. If she used some ready adjectives to describe the massive corporations circa 1900, they didn't strike me as out of place.
June 26, 2025
It took me over a year to read this book so you might think I would give it a 2. Most of the book isn't light reading. I put it down and read 5 other books, then read another 25 pages. But it was a really good book if you're interested in history, curious about Oliver Wendell Holmes, or are interested in the Constitution of the United States. Now if I only had a decent memory!
June 1, 2018
Very comprehensive, well researched, and informative, but incohesive, repetitive, too long, and boring. The book has no thesis; it is simply a recitation of facts. I slogged through it!
December 23, 2012
Maybe I just can't forgive Oliver Wendell Holmes for his "Three generations of imbeciles are enough," but there was a certain coldness to his character that was off putting for me. Though you could call him admirably detached, that trait certainly had its negatives, as for instance his ability to uphold peonage laws against blacks in the south:
"[Justice Charles Evans] Hughes could not believe his eyes when he saw Holmes's dissent, although to those familiar with Holmes's cold intellectuality, his dissent in Bailey would not have come as a surprise. He was, as he always had been, loath to strike down state laws, and he looked no doubt on Alabama's peonage laws with the same objective eyes with which he had viewed New York's maximum hours measure. Only the sanctity of contracts equaled the sanctity of state statutes in Holmes's hierarchy of legal principals, and the consequences to society of tolerating default on contracts were far more serious than the fate of a poor black worker.
"He saw Bailey's case as one involving breach of contract and fraud, and Bailey himself as a shiftless, irresponsible fellow, not the victim of a discriminatory peonage system."
That said, it is hard not to, at very least, admire Holmes for his long and full life. As Walter Lippmann wrote on his retirement from the court at 90:
"There are few who, reading Judge Holmes's letter of resignation, will not feel that here they touch a life done in grand style. This, they will say, is how to live, and this is how to stop, with every power used to the full, like an army resting, its powder gone but with all its flags flying. ... [H]e is one of that small number who have determined not merely the course of the law but the premises and quality of legal thinking. For this great judge is one of the true philosophers of the English-speaking world, and it is the part of the philosopher to show men not so much what to think as how. This is his immortality. He has altered the casts of thought."
"[Justice Charles Evans] Hughes could not believe his eyes when he saw Holmes's dissent, although to those familiar with Holmes's cold intellectuality, his dissent in Bailey would not have come as a surprise. He was, as he always had been, loath to strike down state laws, and he looked no doubt on Alabama's peonage laws with the same objective eyes with which he had viewed New York's maximum hours measure. Only the sanctity of contracts equaled the sanctity of state statutes in Holmes's hierarchy of legal principals, and the consequences to society of tolerating default on contracts were far more serious than the fate of a poor black worker.
"He saw Bailey's case as one involving breach of contract and fraud, and Bailey himself as a shiftless, irresponsible fellow, not the victim of a discriminatory peonage system."
That said, it is hard not to, at very least, admire Holmes for his long and full life. As Walter Lippmann wrote on his retirement from the court at 90:
"There are few who, reading Judge Holmes's letter of resignation, will not feel that here they touch a life done in grand style. This, they will say, is how to live, and this is how to stop, with every power used to the full, like an army resting, its powder gone but with all its flags flying. ... [H]e is one of that small number who have determined not merely the course of the law but the premises and quality of legal thinking. For this great judge is one of the true philosophers of the English-speaking world, and it is the part of the philosopher to show men not so much what to think as how. This is his immortality. He has altered the casts of thought."
December 12, 2022
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was widely regarded as one of the nation's leading legal intellectuals during his time, and nearly 100 years after Holmes retired from the United States Supreme Court he remains one of the nation's most revered judges. This biography tells the story of Holmes' life and describes the milieu he lived in in thorough fashion. The author occasionally employs lazy intellectual crutches - for example, describing classical studies as dead and stultifying and repeatedly labeling corporations as giant, huge, rapacious, and the like - which detract rather than add to the story. She also appears not to be familiar with many legal concepts, for example, standing to sue, which is one of the most important rules of the law. This is a serious defect in a biography about a judge. On the whole, though, this is an informative and interesting book about one of America's leading legal/literary lights.
August 4, 2019
A fantastic biography of one of the most prolific Supreme Court justices to take the bench. From his early days in Boston, to his final in Washington, OWH Jr. was a man above the fray. Always working to better society as a whole. Individual rights meant little compared to societal existence.
This book is so full of information and history of the court. Many landmark cases are discussed and the reasoning behind the decisions. For those interested in the law, this is a wonderful read. Because of the detail included, it tended to be a slower read, but a very interesting one. The material continued to engage throughout. A wonderful book.
This book is so full of information and history of the court. Many landmark cases are discussed and the reasoning behind the decisions. For those interested in the law, this is a wonderful read. Because of the detail included, it tended to be a slower read, but a very interesting one. The material continued to engage throughout. A wonderful book.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews