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The Essential Holmes: Selections from the Letters, Speeches, Judicial Opinions, and Other Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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From: National Review
Date: 19920525
Author:Teachout, Terry

The Essential Holmes: Selections from the Letters, Speeches, Judicial Opinions, and Other Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., edited by Richard A. Posner (Chicago, 328 pp., $24.95)

OLIVER Wendell Holmes was a double man. A lifelong atheist who "sneered" at the concept of natural law, he took a libertarian line on freedom of expression, strongly arguing in Abrams v. United States, his best-known dissenting opinion, that "when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own ...

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