Mark Dewolfe Howe

MARK DEWOLFE HOWE, who has been Professor of Law at Harvard since 1945, was Secretary to Justice Holmes during the year before the Justice’s death in 1935. He has edited two collections of Holmes’s letters the correspondence with Sir Frederick Pollock and that with Harold Laski. He is the “authorized" biographer of Holmes, and Justice Holmes: The Shaping Years, 181-1-.1870, the first volume of his projected three-volume biography, was published by the Harvard Universify Press last month. The following brief memoir opens up a glimose of one aspect of Holmes’s maturity.

MARK DE WOLFE HOWE was first concerned with the traditions of the Supreme Court in 1933-1934 when he was secretary to Justice Holmes. That same year he was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar. After four years of practice, he was appointed Professor of Law at the University of Buffalo Law School, of which he became the Dean in 1941. There followed four years in the Army, two of which he spent overseas in Military Government. In 1945 he teas discharged with the rank of Colonel and accepted his present post as Professor of Law at Harvard. He is the editor of the Holmes-Pollock Letters and is now engaged in writing the biography of Mr. Justice Holmes.