This book challenges a contemporary consensus on the titanic figure of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes is one of the founders of twentieth-century tort law, but David Rosenberg takes sharp issue with the current portrayal of Holmes as a legal formalist who opposed the notion of strict liability and dogmatically advocated a universal rule of negligence in order to favor industrial development.

Marshaling the evidence found in Holmes's classic The Common Law and other writings, Rosenberg reveals that the opposite was the case, and, in the process, raises troubling questions about the current state of legal scholarship.