The Justice from Beacon Hill: The Life and Times of Oliver Wendell Holmes.

HOW TO EXPLAIN the perennial fascination of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes? Other judges, it could be argued, have decided more law. Benjamin Cardozo, while a state court judge, had occasion to write more abiding opinions on basic questions of modern common law. Other Justices of the Supreme Court such as Hugo Black and William Brennan have probably had greater influence on constitutional doctrine. Yet Holmes remains the preeminent American jurist and legal philosopher because of the historical depth and sheer intellectual horsepower he brought to decision-making. His forceful and glittering personality also played its part.

It is thus a little surprising that Liva Baker's The Justice from Beacon Hill is only the second full biography of Justice Holmes, following Sheldon M. Novick's Honorable Justice, published in 1989. (Catherine Drinker Bowen's 1944 Yankee from Olympus was partly fictionalized and not a work of serious scholarship.)

This is probably just as well. Early writings on Holmes tended to the hagiographic and tendentious. Also, Holmes's papers and correspondence were so vast that they outlasted the lives of a number of would-be-biographers. Those scholars did, however, organize Alpine quantities of papers and gathered collections of Holmes's correspondence with such figures as the British socialist Harold Laski and the jurist Sir Frederick Pollock. With the perspective of more than fifty years and building on the uncompleted labors of these scholars, one can now assess Holmes on the basis of a more or less full record. Liva Baker has made a good job of it.

The book sets Holmes's long life against a large and central slice of American history. Born in 1841, Holmes knew elderly Bostonians who had witnessed the American Revolution; he himself was wounded three times in the Civil War; and he lived until 1935, well into the New Deal and almost up to the eve of the Second World War. Most importantly, he was a sitting judge, first on Massachusetts' highest court, then on the United States Supreme Court, for a critical half-century.

At every stage of that long lifetime Holmes was attuned to the life of the mind, and as a Boston Brahmin he was an intimate of many of its major figures. A reverent young acolyte of Ralph Waldo Emerson, he then had lifelong friendships with his coevals William and Henry James and Henry Adams. In his later years he leavened his reading of Keynes and Oswald Spengler with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, P. G. Wodehouse, and Agatha Christie.

Not the least of his achievements was his legal prose, his striking reduction of abstract ideas to lucid, concise, and aphoristic language: "The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statistics." "It is revolting to have no better reason for a law than that it was laid down in the time of Henry IV." The crisp prose style was carried over to his immense correspondence, quoted throughout this book. His letters were learned, gossipy, irreverent, droll, and always beguiling. And they had the now-lost ease and directness of correspondents who reached adulthood before the widespread transaction of business by telephone.

The author correctly views Holmes as an economic conservative, a social Darwinist, and an elitist. When off the bench, he voiced endlessly his contempt for political progressivism, and he loathed socialism. As Liva Baker puts it, "Economics bored him and utopian economics bored him absolutely." In that innocent pre-Nazi era he flirted with eugenics, even affirming a Virginia sterilization statute directed at the mentally feeble: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Liberals of the Twenties and Thirties who made a plaster saint of Holmes had him wrong, and for much the same reason that they later had his disciple Felix Frankfurter wrong. Both expounded judicial restraint and deference to the legislative branch. For Holmes, it was not for the Supreme Court to judge the wisdom of reform legislation responding to "the felt necessities of the day." This was what legislators were paid for. The Court's duty, rather, was to give effect to legislative action unless some specific provision of the Constitution could be shown to have been violated.

He often found that none had. While privately viewing the Sherman Anti-trust Act as "an imbecile statute," Holmes repeatedly voted to affirm its applications. He upheld all manner of wage-and-hour legislation and other reform measures when satisfied that no constitutional provision had been offended. The same cool logic led him to dissent without apology from a decision striking down an Alabama statute criminalizing a workman's breach of an employment agreement.

The origins of Holmes's famous opinions in the free-speech cases are more obscure. Holmes the Civil War veteran was at first disposed to enforce wartime sedition legislation against pacifists and anarchists. Something changed his mind. Liva Baker sides with those who think it was correspondence originating in a chance meeting on a vacation-bound train with Judge Learned Hand, who had recently thrown out a sedition prosecution only to see his opinion reversed on appeal. Others point to the influence of Frankfurter and other young liberal intellectuals.

We will probably never know. It will not be doubted, however, that the "clear and present danger" standard and the supporting rhetoric ("freedom for the thoughts we hate") are now part of the permanent juridical and intellectual patrimony of the nation.

One could take issue with Liva Baker's occasional exaggerations. Her pronouncement that "Burger's Court . . . began in the early 1970s to emasculate the exclusionary rule until it existed practically in name only" gets a little ahead of the story, as any perusal of current criminal decisions will demonstrate. But these are minor blemishes in an admirable work, well researched and dramatically written, that should serve as a needed introduction to one of the greatest figures in American intellectual history and public life.

Mr. Collins is a New York lawyer.