Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self.

G. Edward White 

Oxford University Press, 200 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016. 628 pp., $37.50.

The publication of a biography of one of this nation's most highly regarded jurists by one of our leading legal historians is an occasion for even casual readers of legal history to note. G. Edward White, the John B. Minor Professor of Law and History at the University of Virginia, has written often and well about the history and philosophy of judicial decision making. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the subject of his latest biography, has occupied a prominent place in the literature on jurisprudence and the intellectual history of law produced by White in many books and articles over the last two decades.

White has now written what might be labeled an "interpretive biography" of Justice Holmes. Any biography necessarily interprets the life of its subject to some degree. White, however, focuses much more on both the public and the private words that Holmes wrote and uses them as a window through which to glimpse his developing "inner self." In many respects, White uses the techniques of a literary interpreter as the framework from which to hang his frequently engrossing story of Holmes's professional career and private life.

The first chapter, "Heritage," introduces the reader to the methodology that the author uses throughout the book. Instead of presenting a dry listing of Holmes's family members and their accomplishments, White builds the chapter around a brief biographical sketch written by Holmes as he graduated from Harvard and waited to depart for active service in the Civil War.

Explicated line by line, the sketch serves as the basis for a detailed examination of Holmes's heritage and White's interpretation of the effects of that heritage on Holmes's complex character. White repeats this pattern of interpreting Holmes's diary entries, correspondence, and public addresses to deepen our understanding of Holmes at critical moments in his personal life and professional career.

Nearly one-fifth of the book is devoted to a careful analysis of Holmes's legal scholarship. Foremost among those scholarly efforts is the lecture series that became The Common Law. In the chapters on Holmes's scholarship, White effectively traces the intellectual development of someone whose thoughts as a scholar would play an important role in his decisions as a judge. This part of the book may be slower going for all but the professional scholar, but it provides an opportunity to see the care with which White pulls apart Holmes's works and questions the conventional understanding of their meaning. The reader is left with a richer appreciation of the link between Holmes the scholar and Holmes the judge.

Lawyers are likely to be most interested in the treatment of Holmes's half century on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts and the U.S. Supreme Court. Chapters on Holmes's judicial career provide an interesting account of the way he approached the work of a judge, and they are frequently fascinating explorations of the extensions of the persona and the conceptual view Of law that Holmes created for himself at important stages in his life before appointment to the bench.

A particularly striking point that emerges from this part of the biography is that Holmes labored in comparative obscurity until very late in his career. One thinks of Churchill as another public figure who would be largely unremarkable had not history thrust huge problems on him at a relatively advanced age.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self is in many ways an exercise in demythologizing a central figure in U.S. legal history and culture. Holmes emerges as no unquatifiedly admirable "Yankee from Olympus," as Catherine Bowen's 1944 biography labeled him, and it may be difficult to see Holmes, the legal intellectual, as deserving of the unthinking veneration later generations have sometimes given him.

In what is probably his most famous line, Holmes wrote, "The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience." This biography is an admirable and eminently readable demonstration of how the relationship between Holmes's careers as a scholar and a judge was affected as much by the frequently inconsistent logic of his intellectual pursuits as it was by the experience of his life.

Paul A. LeBel is a professor of law at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.