Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr. (1841-1935), was one of the best-known American judges of the 1900’s. He served as a member of the Supreme Court of the United States for nearly 30 years. During that period, he made great contributions to the changing concepts of law. His keen intellect, humor, and ability to express himself helped to direct American thought.
Early life.
Holmes was born on March 8, 1841, in Boston, and was named for his famous father, the writer and physician. He enlisted in the Union Army, fought through most of the American Civil War (1861-1865), and was wounded three times. Holmes resigned as a lieutenant colonel in 1864.
As a young man, Holmes was a close friend of the American philosopher William James, and thought of becoming a philosopher himself. Law, he said, was “a rag bag of details.” Yet, at the end of his war service, he entered Harvard Law School at the urging of his father. Early in his career, he became coeditor of the American Law Review and wrote his great work, The Common Law (1881). In 1882, he became a professor of law at Harvard and was appointed to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. He became chief justice of Massachusetts in 1899.
Supreme Court justice.
President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Holmes an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States in 1902. At that time, the court was declaring many state laws unconstitutional because they did not conform to the judges’ concept of “due process of law.” Holmes insisted that this phrase in Amendment 14 had not been intended to deny the states a right to experiment with social legislation (see Constitution of the United States (Amendment 14) ). He protested so often when the court seemed to write its economic theories into the Constitution that he became known as the Great Dissenter. He was often joined in his dissents by Associate Justice Louis D. Brandeis. In later years, as new judges replaced some of the conservatives, the court accepted the ideas in many of Holmes’s dissents.
Much of the legislation Holmes voted to save was designed to improve social conditions. But he was not primarily a reformer. He believed in bigness, and often expressed admiration for industrial tycoons. His dissents did not indicate that he approved the laws that the majority was striking down. Rather, he dissented because he believed that judges have no right to interfere with legislative policy unless it violates the Constitution.
“The life of the law,” Holmes wrote, “has not been logic; it has been experience.” By insisting that the court look at facts in a changing society, instead of clinging to worn-out slogans and formulas, Holmes exercised a deep influence on the law. He influenced judges to keep from allowing their personal opinions to affect their decisions. This doctrine, known as judicial restraint, has since come to dominate American judicial thinking.
Holmes’s sharp phrases as well as his philosophy caught the public imagination. People understood him because he was “down to earth.” In some respects, he is more famous as a philosopher than as a judge.
With all his brilliance, Holmes was a man of many contradictions. His inclination to let the states experiment led to some opinions now regarded as illiberal. His major contribution was in convincing people that the law should develop along with the society it serves. He died on March 6, 1935.
Holmes is one of the few judges of his time who could truthfully say that he felt “the secret isolated joy of the thinker, who knows that, a hundred years after he is dead and forgotten, men who never heard of him will be moving to the measure of his thought.”
