Abstract: This bold book challenges a contemporary consensus on the titanic figure of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes is the acknowledged source of twentieth-century tort law, but David Rosenberg takes sharp issue with the current portrayal of Holmes as a legal formalist in torts who opposed the notion of strict liability and dogmatically advocated a universal rule of negligence, primarily to subsidize industrial development. Marshaling the evidence found in Holmes' classic "The Common Law" and other writings, the author reveals that the opposite was the case, and, in the process, raises troubling questions about the present state of legal scholarship.