Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., pragmatism, and the jurisprudence of Agon : aesthetic dissent and the common law / Allen Mendenhall.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mendenhall, Allen, 1983- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 1841-1935.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell.

United States. Supreme Court.

United States.

United States. Supreme Court--Officials and employees--Biography.

Dissenting opinions--United States.

Dissenting opinions.

Judges--United States--Biography.

Judges.

Employees.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xxix, 171 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Lewisburg : Bucknell University Press, [2017]

Summary:

This book argues that Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. helps us see the law through an Emersonian lens by the way in which he wrote his judicial dissents. Holmes's literary style mimics and enacts two characteristics of Ralph Waldo Emerson's thought: "superfluity" and the "poetics of transition," concepts ascribed to Emerson and developed by literary critic Richard Poirier. Using this aesthetic style borrowed from Emerson and carried out by later pragmatists, Holmes not only made it more likely that his dissents would remain alive for future judges or justices (because how they were written was itself memorable, whatever the value of their content), but also shaped our understanding of dissents and, in this, our understanding of law. By opening constitutional precedent to potential change, Holmes's dissents made room for future thought, moving our understanding of legal concepts in a more pragmatic direction and away from formalistic understandings of law. Included in this new understanding is the idea that the "canon" of judicial cases involves oppositional positions that must be sustained if the law is to serve pragmatic purposes. This process of precedent-making in a common-law system resembles the construction of the literary canon as it is conceived by Harold Bloom and Richard Posner. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Holmes's Dissents and Emersonian Superfluity 1

2 The Poetics of Transition and Vindicated Dissents 43

3 Canon Formation and the Marketplace of Ideas 81

4 Holmes and the Differential Reproduction of Emersonian Ideas in a Transitional Era 109.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Mendenhall, Allen, 1983- author. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., pragmatism, and the jurisprudence of Agon

ISBN:

9781611487916

1611487919

OCLC:

958782063