University of Wisconsin–Madison

Category: The Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court

The Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise: an Introduction

Professor Marcus offers a short account of the checkered progress of the Holmes Devise.

Reflections on the Two Most Recent Holmes Devise Histories of the Supreme Court (Including Mine)

I believe that Post addresses concerns about how judges worked the ideas into their opinions by seeing the Justices as proto-philosophers (or proto-legal-academics), who have a deep commitment to developing coherent schemas.

Writing for the Holmes Devise

The essential ambition of the Taft Court volume was to invite legal historians to once again conceptualize judges and their courts as cultural actors who respond to the same sets of tensions and challenges as those that spur all cultural actors to give meaning to their times. Tushnet is off base to dismiss this approach as a form of “conceptualism.”