SOURCE: "The Integrity of Holmes' Jurisprudence," in Intervention and Detachment: Essays in Legal History and Jurisprudence, Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 75-99.

In the following essay, White traces the concurrence of the tenures of Justices Holmes and Louis Brandeis with the rise of modern judicial liberalism.

A sharp distinction between "nineteenth-century" and "twentieth-century" phases of the American judicial tradition has some artificial features. Older jurisprudential attitudes and theories of judging persisted after 1900; their persistence, in fact, is one of the features of American judicial history in the twentieth century. The striking twentieth-century changes in the intellectual climate in which judicial decisions were made, discussed in this [essay], . . . should not create an inference that the nineteenth century, by contrast, was static in its jurisprudence; the difference is one of degree. Finally, the prominence given in this [essay] to modern liberalism as a force helping to redefine judicial attitudes cannot. . . be...