AUDIO

The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind—and Changed the History of Free Speech in America

by Thomas Healy
9 CDs. retail ed. unabridged. 10½ hours. Tantor Audio. 2013. ISBN 9781452616162. $39.99; 9 CDs. library ed.; 1 MP3-CD. retail ed.; Playaway digital; digital download. HIST
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Throughout most of his career, Oliver Wendell Holmes held and espoused a conservative view on free speech in line with the majority of his peers. But as a Supreme Court justice in 1919 he issued a dissenting opinion in the sedition case of Abrams v. United States that proposed a broader and more tolerant interpretation. Relying heavily on the correspondence and memos of Holmes, Healy (law, Seton Hall; I Have Heard You Calling in the Night) shows how a group of younger progressive jurists including Learned Hand, Felix Frankfurter, and Harold Laski influenced the thinking of the elderly Holmes. Effectively narrated by veteran actor Danny Campbell, the book offers extraordinary insight into the social and intellectual atmosphere of early 20th-century America.
VERDICT Recommended for followers of legal and intellectual history.
Reviewed by Forrest E. Link, Coll. of New Jersey Lib., Ewing , Jan 01, 2014
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