Howe, Mark Dewolfe (1902–1966)
HOWE, MARK DEWOLFE (1902–1966)
Mark DeWolfe Howe began his legal career as a clerk to Justice oliver wendell holmes, and throughout his life Holmes was the focus of much of Howe's most valuable scholarly work. While professor of law at Harvard Law School, Howe prepared definitive editions of Holmes's correspondence with Sir Frederick Pollock (1941) and harold j. laski (1953), his civil war diary and letters (1947), his Speeches (1962), and The Common Law (1963). Although Howe never lived to complete his biography of Holmes, the two volumes he did publish (1957, 1963) are unparalleled for their illumination of Holmes's intellectual life up to his appointment to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. A pioneer in the field of American legal history, Howe specialized in the history of freedom of religion. In his last published book, The Garden and the Wilderness (1965), Howe criticized the Supreme Court's reading of the history of religion in America, pointing out that the "wall of separation" between church and state was based as much on evangelical theory as Jeffersonian rationalism; Howe suggested that the Constitution recognized a de factoestablishment of religion in American society. An activist as well as a scholar, Howe worked tirelessly for the naacp legal defense & educational fund, both as a teacher and as a litigator.
Richard B. Bernstein
(1986)