Law Commons^™

Cardozo: A Study In Reputation. By Richard A. Posner, Joseph E. Claxton

Mercer Law Review

Biography, wrote the great American historian Barbara Tuchman, is "a prism of history," useful as a genre of literature because of two factors. First, "biography attracts and holds the reader's interest in the larger subject." Second, in its best form it provides a structure within which intellectual analysis may find parameters that, far from being restrictive, actually provide a necessary channel for bringing the larger subject matter (a subject matter that transcends the life and work of one individual) into perspective. In Tuchman's words:

[Bliography is useful because it encompasses the universal in the particular. It is a focus that …