The Great Dissent, Thomas Healy
The Great Dissent, Thomas Healy
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The Great Dissent
How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind--and Changed the History of Free Speech in America

Author: Thomas Healy

Narrator: Danny Campbell

Unabridged: 10 hr 20 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/26/2013

Synopsis

No right seems more fundamental to American public life than freedom of speech. Yet well into the twentieth century, that freedom was still an unfulfilled promise, with Americans regularly imprisoned merely for speaking out against government policies. Indeed, free speech as we know it comes less from the First Amendment than from a most unexpected source: Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. A lifelong skeptic, he disdained all individual rights, including the right to express one's political views. But in 1919, it was Holmes who wrote a dissenting opinion that would become the canonical affirmation of free speech in the United States.

Why did Holmes change his mind? That question has puzzled historians for almost a century. Now, with the aid of newly discovered letters and confidential memos, law professor Thomas Healy reconstructs in vivid detail Holmes's journey from free-speech opponent to First Amendment hero. It is the story of a remarkable behind-the-scenes campaign by a group of progressives to bring a legal icon around to their way of thinking—and a deeply touching human narrative of an old man saved from loneliness and despair by a few unlikely young friends.

Beautifully written and exhaustively researched, The Great Dissent is intellectual history at its best, revealing how free debate can alter the life of a man and the legal landscape of an entire nation.

About Thomas Healy

Thomas Healy is a professor of law at Seton Hall Law School. A graduate of Columbia Law School, he clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and was a Supreme Court correspondent for the Baltimore Sun. He has written extensively about free speech, the Constitution, and the federal courts. The Great Dissent is his first book.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jean on April 27, 2019

I learned so much from this book. I must admit I had not read or studied anything about the history of the first amendment before. This absorbing book is about the law and also about change, how one man's thinking evolved nearly 100 years ago. For 125 years the first amendment was essentially dead u......more

Goodreads review by Cora on December 28, 2015

Freedom of speech is as American as apple pie. It's not only a central safeguard in the Bill of Rights, it's central to American self-identity as a democratic nation. When college students criticize freedom of speech, national pundits must weigh in on what it all means. Hucksters like Sarah Palin us......more

Goodreads review by Colleen on January 04, 2019

Healy examines the road that Holmes took to get to the "clear and present danger" requirement in judging protected speech. Encouraged by friends, including Felix Frankfurter, Harold Laski, Learned Hand, Zacharia Chafee, and Louis Brandeis, Holmes' views on free speech evolved and his dissent in the......more

Goodreads review by Abhi on April 12, 2020

In any course/book on US Constitutional History, Oliver Wendell Holmes' Abrams v. US dissent is considered epochal - the founding document of the free speech era. In most of these books that I'd read, Holmes' preceding and dare-I-say antipodal opinion in Debs v. US is mentioned merely to dramatize th......more

Goodreads review by Patty on August 22, 2013

I entered the Goodreads early reader giveaway for The Great Dissent for my husband so this is really his review: He told me that the book was utterly fascinating. He had a hard time putting it down. He is a retired attorney so the subject matter was immediately interesting for him. He said the book......more

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