Holmes-Pollock Letters

Too often Justice Holmes has been called simply a Great Liberal Judge — an oversimplification, which he abominated. Readers of his opinions know better. No simply liberal spirit, however great, could now, almost a decade after his retirement and death, possess the Supreme Court as effectively as Marshall himself while he was presiding as Chief Justice. Holmes’s friends had other reasons to know better, and here in this correspondence are some of them. He and Sir Frederick Pollock wrote each other, casually and intermittently, on every subject, from technical law to their views of the cosmos. They began in the 1870’s, when they were in their thirties. They did not stop till they were beyond ninety, and soon, as Holmes put it, to be ‘eating dandelions by the roots.’ Some of Holmes this is, a piece of him; not so much, of course, as there is in the opinions, nor in his Collected Legal Papers, nor as much as there will be in a biography, f et here is something that only his friends have seen before, what he himself always prized most in others — the aperçus, insights and glimpses, and views down long vistas. C. P. C.