Word: novick
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...fact, several biographical attempts--conducted by then-Harvard Law Professor Felix Frankfurter, Mark DeWolfe Howe, one of Holmes' legal secretaries, and Grant Gilmore, a professor of law at Yale--have been made since Holmes' death in 1935. But until Sheldon Novick's brilliant and illuminating examination of Holmes' life was released, no one had succeeded in mapping the life of the Olympian jurist...
...Novick, who used his own research as well as the material gathered by the previous biographers, has produced an incredibly well-documented book, with 75 pages of endnotes. In his quest for detail, the author has even gone so far as to inquire of Dr. Peter F. Stevens, curator of Harvard's herbaria, the genus of a sprig of leaves that an admirer enclosed in a letter to Holmes. He also checked Harvard library records to determine exactly what day Holmes checked out a particularly important book on mysticism during his college days...
...NOVICK, however, manages to keep the day-to-day details from dominating the text, helping the reader focus instead on the broader themes of Holmes' life. In particular, he emphasizes the path of Holmes' legal ideas: how they formed in his college and war days, grew during his early legal experience and blossomed into a fascinating ideology that has since been incorporated into our common...
Despite the subject matter, the legalese is not too confusing, however. Novick, a professor of law at the University of Vermont, does his best to explain in human terms the theories behind the decisions and their significance. And the author's characterizations of the other justices and his descriptions of way the Court made its decisions will be enough to hold the interest of those who are still not consumed by legal theories...
...clear to anyone who reads the excerpts of his brilliant opinions why Holmes is so widely admired by legal scholars. But Novick is not afraid to point out the views held by the justice which would be considered dangerous and cruel today, even if they were not considered so then. For example, Novick describes Holmes' failure to support the voting rights of Blacks in the South. And he spends some time analyzing Holmes' most controversial--and perhaps even Fascist--opinion, which gave states the right to sterilize poor women who were institutionalized...