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Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. - "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins"



On this date in 1841, jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the namesake and son of a famed physician. Holmes graduated from Harvard in 1861 and immediately enlisted in the Army, where he was seriously wounded three times. After the Civil War, Holmes entered Harvard Law School, where his best friend was William James. The New York Times obituary on Holmes reported that the two young men went to Europe together: “while James went on, continuing in Germany his search for the meanings of the universe, Holmes decided that 'maybe the universe is too great a swell to have a meaning,' that his task was to 'make his own universe livable,' and he dove deep into the study of the law.” Holmes was admitted to the bar in 1866. He became coeditor of the American Law Review in 1870. Holmes wrote his legal treatise, The Common Law, in 1881, a 15-year labor predicated on his belief that “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.” His recodification of the law from religious foundations to modern jurisprudence was pivotal to the evolution of legal scholarship.

Holmes urged “judicial restraint,” or the divorcing of private views from legal opinions. A professor at Harvard Law School, he was appointed at age 41 as an associate justice on the Massachusetts Supreme Court, eventually becoming chief justice. Pres. Teddy Roosevelt appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1902. He retired in 1932, as the oldest judge to serve. Holmes earned the sobriquet, “The Great Dissenter,” for his many famous dissents, which have long since been adopted as mainstream by courts. Among his well-known legal adages:
“Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
“The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater…”
Holmes, like his father, was a Unitarian, who believed in a god, but was creedless. D. 1935.


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reading/blog/2013-09-19-134100.txt · Last modified: 2018/04/22 23:27 (external edit)