BOOK REVIEW : Legal Legend Brought to Earth : THE JUSTICE FROM BEACON HILL; The Life and Times of Oliver Wendell Holmes <i> by Liva Baker</i> HarperCollins, $29.95, 783 pages

The sorry spectacle of recent Supreme Court confirmation proceedings--Bork, Ginsberg, Souter, Thomas--reminds us that the high court no longer seems to attract jurists of the stature of, say, Oliver Wendell Holmes.

And now Liva Baker comes along to tell us that even the legendary Mr. Justice Holmes--”the Yankee from Olympus,” as he was dubbed by one adoring author--was somewhat less than the jurisprudential demigod that his reputation advertises.

Holmes has been rendered by historians, novelists and playwrights as “a serene immortal figure that never really existed,” Baker points out in “The Justice From Beacon Hill.” But the real man might not have come off any better than more recent nominees in front of the unforgiving television cameras.

“They chiseled in the parts of him they admired,” Baker writes of the hagiographers of Oliver Wendell Holmes, “but ignored the contradictions in his nature, his Malthus-inspired pessimism and frustrations, his egotism, an ambition so intense he sometimes alienated his best friends, his cosmic confusions, his infidelities, the strong sense of isolation that runs through his writings, his wariness of intimacy in human relations, his general aloofness from the mainstream of life.”

All of these flaws and quirks are reclaimed from the dustbin of history and put to good use by Baker in creating a lifelike portrait of “the Great Dissenter” in her ambitious biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes--a fat, satisfying and highly readable account that manages to achieve both intimacy and sweep.

Holmes, of course, is an indisputably colorful and compelling figure whose life intersected with the powerful currents of American history and culture over nearly a century. Born in 1841, son of the famous poet-physician whose name and mantle he carried, Holmes was a scion of “the New England intellectual aristocracy during its finest flowering.” Longfellow, Emerson and Hawthorne were among his father’s circle of friends, and Melville was a neighbor.

From his earliest years, Holmes lived up to what was expected of him, first as a student at Harvard, then as officer in the Union Army during the Civil War. But it was not until he reached the high courts--first the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, then the United States Supreme Court--that he began to distinguish himself as a legal philosopher and a practicing lawgiver in cases that touched on everything from trust-busting to lynching and sterilization.

Holmes was capable of cracking a joke--”Oh, to be 70 again!” was the octogenarian’s much-quoted quip on seeing a pretty young woman--but he regarded the world with a cold eye. He was fundamentally unimpressed by humanity and saw “no reason to believe that a shudder could go through the sky if the whole ant heap were kerosened.” His dark view of the cosmos, his chilly fatalism, were reflected in his judicial philosophy and practice.

“Holmes had no wish to reshape the world, to redistribute wealth, and he was contemptuous and skeptical of those who did,” she writes of his fix on the moral universe. “He had come to (the high court) with his bags packed and had left little room for a new suit--a tie, perhaps, or a pair of cuff links, nothing substantial.”

Still, Holmes was one intellectual aristocrat with a gift for bringing plain speech to the making and shaping of the law, even if his blunt words sometimes lacked heart: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” he wrote in justification of forced sterilization. “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater,” was his famous formulation of the limits of the First Amendment.

Baker, too, is gifted with the facility for writing plainly and compellingly about the fine points of law, but her work is leavened with a certain sympathy and compassion that were lacking in Holmes himself. “The Justice From Beacon Hill” brings the great man down to earth, where we can look him in the eye and see not only his cool intellect and wry humor but also the pain, the loneliness and the longing.

Next: Richard Eder reviews Francis Steegmuller, “A Woman, A Man and Two Kingdoms” (Knopf) .