Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr.

born March 8, 1841, Boston, Mass.

died March 6, 1935, Washington, D.C.

U.S. jurist, legal historian, and philosopher.

He was the son of Oliver Wendell Holmes and Amelia Lee Jackson, daughter of a Massachusetts supreme court justice. As an officer in the American Civil War, he was seriously wounded three times. He practiced law in Boston from 1867, eventually serving as an associate justice (1882–99) and then chief justice (1899–1902) of the state supreme court. In The Common Law (1881), he advanced the notion of law as accumulated experience rather than science. Appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States by Pres. Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, Holmes advocated judicial restraint, maintaining that lawmaking was the business of legislative bodies rather than the courts. In Schenk v. U.S. (1919), he articulated the "clear and present danger" test for proposed restrictions on freedom of speech. Many of his vigorous and lucid opinions, including dissenting opinions (he was known as "The Great Dissenter"), became classic interpretations of the law, and he is regarded as one of the foremost jurists of the modern age. He served until 1932.

Justice Holmes

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▪ United States jurist

Introduction

byname  The Great Dissenter  

born March 8, 1841, Boston

died March 6, 1935, Washington, D.C.

 justice of the United States Supreme Court, U.S. legal historian and philosopher who advocated judicial restraint. He stated the concept of “clear and present danger” as the only basis for limiting free speech.

Early life and Civil War experience.

      Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was the first child of the celebrated writer and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes. The family background on both sides represented the New England “aristocracy” of character and accomplishment. His father was descended from the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet; he married Amelia Lee Jackson, whose father, Charles, was a justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of the State of Massachusetts, a bench on which Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was to sit for 20 years. He was proud of this heritage and spoke of it often. It helped shape his mind and character.

      Young Holmes went to a private school and then to Harvard College. He was graduated in the class of 1861 and like his father before him was class poet. At the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War he enlisted as a private in the 4th Battalion of Infantry and began training at Boston's Fort Independence, not expecting to finish the academic year or take his degree. The battalion was not called up, and after graduation the young man applied for and received, in July, a commission as first lieutenant in the 20th Massachusetts Regiment of Volunteers. He was 20 years old at that time.

      His letters and diary give vivid pictures of his war experiences. He was seriously wounded three times, at the battles of Ball's Bluff, Antietam, and Chancellorsville. He left the army after three years, having been commissioned lieutenant colonel although mustered out with the rank of captain. Holmes described war as “an organized bore.” He said, “I trust I did my duty as a soldier respectably, but I was not born for it and did nothing remarkable in that way.” In a Memorial Day address to fellow veterans, in 1884, he attributed a certain value to the war experience: “Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.” This is an aspect of his conviction that “. . . it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged never to have lived.”

Legal studies.

      In the autumn of 1864 he entered Harvard Law School, ironically without any clear sense of vocation. He had even contemplated medicine, to which his father objected. On different occasions, he said that his “Governor” “put on the screws to have me go to the Law School” or “kicked” him into it. There is a story that, when young Holmes announced to his father the decision to enter the law school, the doctor said, “What's the use of that, Wendell? A lawyer can't be a great man.” There was not a deep affinity between father and son. The little doctor's puns and quips, his easy display of emotion, and a somewhat patronizing attitude chafed the tall, less talkative, inherently shy law student. The philosopher William James, perhaps the closest friend of Wendell in the immediate postwar years, once remarked that “no love is lost” between father and son.

      Holmes experienced a certain restlessness in law school, finding the tradition of the law as presented in an uninspired curriculum to be stagnant and narrowly precedent-centred. The science, philosophy, or history of law were slighted, and these, rather than what he later called “the small change of legal thought,” were what captured Holmes's mind and drew him into the depths of a profession toward which at first he had not felt a powerful incentive.

      After finishing law school in 1866 he made the conventional “pilgrimage” abroad, visiting England, France, and Switzerland and meeting a variety of distinguished men. He was admitted to the bar in 1867 and for 15 years practiced law as a member of several firms. From 1870 to 1873 he was an editor of the American Law Review. He edited the 12th edition of the classic survey of early American law, Chancellor James Kent's (1763–1847) Commentaries on American Law (1873). He also lectured at Harvard on law.

      During this busy time he was engaged in courtship. Always something of a ladies' man, he had maintained a long friendship with Fanny Bowditch Dixwell, daughter of his onetime schoolmaster. She had waited patiently through wartime, his law studies, travel, and apprenticeship. Holmes and Dixwell were married at last on June 17, 1872. The marriage, happy and long lasting, was childless.

The Common Law.

      In 1880–81 Holmes was invited to lecture on the common law at the Lowell Institute in Boston, and from these addresses developed his book The Common Law (1881). Here the genius of Holmes was first clearly revealed and the consistent direction of his thought made evident. A fresh voice was speaking in his words:

The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics. In order to know what it is, we must know what it has been, and what it tends to become. We must alternately consult history and existing theories of legislation. But the most difficult labor will be to understand the combination of the two into new products at every stage. The substance of the law at any given time pretty nearly corresponds, so far as it goes, with what is then understood to be convenient; but its form and machinery, and the degree to which it is able to work out desired results, depend very much upon its past.

      In January 1882 Holmes was made Weld Professor of Law, a chair established for him at Harvard Law School. In December of the same year he accepted appointment to the Supreme Judicial Court of the State of Massachusetts, knowing the judgeship was his destiny and the function through which he could most influence the development of law. He was to sit on that bench for 20 years, becoming its chief justice in 1899. In 1902 Pres. Theodore Roosevelt appointed him associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. He sat on that court to a more advanced age than did any other man, retiring on Jan. 12, 1932, soon before his 91st birthday.

      Fanny Holmes, devoted, witty, wise, tactful, and perceptive, died on April 30, 1929. Holmes wrote to his intimate friend, the English jurist Sir Frederick Pollock, “For sixty years she made life poetry for me and at 88 one must be ready for the end. I shall keep at work and interested while it lasts—though not caring very much for how long.” He died two days before his 94th birthday.

Justice of the Supreme Court.

      In that long span of years on the Supreme Court he became acknowledged as one of the most notable jurists of the age—in the opinion of many the foremost. Often he has been called The Great Dissenter because of the brilliance of his dissenting opinions, but the phrase gives a falsely negative emphasis, and his penetration and originality are seen as fully in the opinions in which he expressed or concurred in the majority view of the court as in those in which he was in dissent.

      Holmes believed that the making of laws is the business of legislative bodies, not of courts, and that within constitutional bounds the people have a right to whatever laws they choose to make, good or bad, through their elected representatives. He stated the concept of “clear and present danger” as the only basis for curtailing the right of freedom of speech, illustrating it with the homely example: “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”

      He wrote that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market. . . . That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution.” Again: “If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”

      A man austerely dedicated to his work, he also enjoyed the earthy and the droll. He loved Rabelais. Sometimes in Washington he attended burlesque shows and was said to have remarked, “I thank God I am a man of low tastes.” The newly inaugurated President Franklin D. Roosevelt called upon the retired justice and found him reading Plato. “Why do you read Plato, Mr. Justice?” “To improve my mind, Mr. President,” replied the 92-year-old man.

      Holmes won the love and admiration of generations of lawyers and judges in his long career. When he resigned from the Supreme Court, his “brethren,” as he always addressed his fellow justices, wrote him a letter signed by all, saying in part:

Your profound learning and philosophic outlook have found expression in opinions which have become classic, enriching the literature of the law as well as its substance. . . . While we are losing the privilege of daily companionship, the most precious memories of your unfailing kindliness and generous nature abide with us, and these memories will ever be one of the choicest traditions of the Court.

Edmund Fuller

Additional Reading

The principal biography is Mark DeWolfe Howe, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, vol. 1, The Shaping Years, 1841–1870 (1957), and vol. 2, The Proving Years, 1870–1882 (1963). Others are Catherine Drinker Bowen, Yankee from Olympus: Justice Holmes and His Family (1944, reissued 1980); Francis Biddle, Mr. Justice Holmes (1942, reprinted 1999); Silas Bent, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (1932, reprinted 1996); and G. Edward White, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self (1993). Both appraisal and biographical material may be found in Felix Frankfurter (ed.), Mr. Justice Holmes: A Collection of Essays, 2nd ed. (1961), and Mr. Justice Holmes and the Supreme Court (1938). A dissenting opinion is filed in Albert W. Alschuler, Law Without Values: The Life, Work, and Legacy of Justice Holmes (2000).

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