SOURCE: "The Integrity of Holmes' Jurisprudence," in Intervention and Detachment: Essays in Legal History and Jurisprudence, Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 75-99.

In the following essay, White addresses apparent contradictions in Holmes's judicial actions and writings.

Writing about Oliver Wendell Holmes can be likened to playing Hamlet in the theatre: it is a kind of apprenticeship that legal scholars undertake as a way of measuring their fitness to endure the academic travails ahead. Holmes himself engaged in a similar rite of passage when he wrote an essay on Plato as a Harvard undergraduate. Plato's thought, Holmes claimed, "needed a complete remodeling"; Holmes' generation "start[ed] far beyond the place where Plato rested."¹ Ralph Waldo Emerson, to whom Holmes showed a draft of his essay, suggested that "[w]hen you strike at a king, you must kill him."² The urge to strike at Holmes has been recurrent, and the man...