It was fun to be a boy in Boston in 1850.  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and his friend Henry had wonderful times coasting down Beacon Hill on their sleds in winter and rowing a boat on the Charles River in summer.  There were interesting sights at the wharf, too: the strange ships from faraway ports, the foreign sailormen with their queer talk and the gold rings in their ears. There was Donald McKay's shipyard, with the ships a-building; there was the excitement of the launchings, when the great hulls slid down the ways and landed with a mighty splash on the waters of the bay. 

As Wendell grew older, there was serious talk in the streets and at the dinner table of Wendell's famous father, the poet and physician, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.  Talk of slavery and abolition, of new states being admitted to the Union, of threats of secession, of laws that were out of step with the changing times.  Wendell listened to his elders and began reading papers and books—and thought about the law. 

Through college days at Harvard and during his military service, Wendell continued to think about the law.  When he was mustered out of the army he knew what his life work would be: he would study the law; he would be a jurist.

The work was hard, and success was slow in coming.  But gradually Wendell Holmes made his way—lawyer, lecturer, author, professor; then judge of the Supreme Court of his own state, and finally associate justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Justice Holmes never sat on the bench in the beautiful new Supreme Court Building, with its stately columns and the words "EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW" chiselled in granite above them.  But his opinions and dissents, long after his death, will continue to shape history and to help obtain what he thought law and the Constitution should provide—the greatest good for the greatest number.  

From the dust jacket