Collected Legal Papers

Originally published: New York: Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1920. [2], 316 pp. A valuable compilation, this volume contains Holmes most famous speeches and papers from 1885 to 1918. Its publication in 1920 was an important event in the legal community, and it was reviewed with great enthusiasm in the major journals and law reviews. Roscoe Pound offered the finest assessment in Judge Holmes s Contributions to the Science of Law, an essay-review from 1921 that analyzed the place of these writings in the development of American law from the 1880s to the 1920s: Rereading them consecutively in their new form and remembering the dates of their original publication, one can but see that their author has done more than lead American juristic thought of the present generation. Above all others he has shaped the methods and ideas that are characteristic of the present as distinguished from the immediate past. : Roscoe Pound, Harvard Law Review 34 (1920-1921):449.