SOURCE: "The Shaping of Wendell Holmes," in Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Twayne Publishers, 1980, pp. 13-35.

In the following essay, Burton recounts major influences on Holmes's thinking and surveys his early writings.

The law was part of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s, natural inheritance. Lawyers had been in the family at least from the time of the sixteenth century—Thomas Holmes of Gray's Inn—and judges, too, a maternal grandfather, Charles Jackson, having been a justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. For his part, immediately upon completion of Civil War service, Holmes commenced his legal studies at Harvard and for the next seventy years, down to his death in 1935, his career never deviated from his commitment to understanding the meaning and usage of law. As a student, attorney, scholar, judge, Supreme Court justice, and elder legal statesman, Holmes came to value the law not as an abstruse...