| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Albert W. Alschuler. Law without Values: The Life, Work, and Legacy of Justice Holmes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2000. Pp. x, 325. $30.00.

In one relatively brief, well-written, occasionally quite humorous, and always interesting book, Albert W. Alschuler has combined two different varieties of scholarship: an intellectual biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and the argument that Holmes played a significant part in an intellectual movement that stripped natural law thinking out of American understanding of things legal, an action that Alschuler believes has led to all sorts of contemporary social and intellectual evils. 1

Holmes is generally considered to be both one of the great Supreme Court justices and one of the great legal thinkers of the post-Civil War United States. Alschuler dissents emphatically from that evaluation. He begins his story conventionally enough with a young, ambitious abolitionist who idealistically goes off to war only to experience soldiering as a meaningless, brutal fight for personal survival in which the only virtue is blindly doing a duty at best dimly understood. From there on, everything goes downhill into self-interest, intellectual arrogance, the celebration of force and violence, eugenic prescriptions for the survival of the fittest, and the meaninglessness of it all. . . .

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