Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr. (1841–1935), judge, legal scholar, and justice of the U.S.
Supreme Court, 1902–1932.Oliver Wendell Holmes consistently ranks as one of the “great” justices to sit on the Supreme Court. Born in
Boston, the son of the physician, poet, and man of letters Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Holmes graduated from Harvard College in 1861. He was wounded three times while serving in the Union Army during the
Civil War. Graduating from Harvard Law School in 1866, he practiced law in Boston, edited a legal journal, and wrote several scholarly essays in legal history and jurisprudence. His
The Common Law (1881) ranks as one of the most important works of nineteenth‐century legal scholarship. This work earned Holmes a professorship at Harvard Law School in 1882, but he left after six months to become an associate justice on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts; he became its chief justice in 1898. President Theodore
Roosevelt appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1901.
In 1905, Holmes wrote one of his best known opinions, his dissent in
Lochner v. New York, which argued that judges should defer to the wishes of legislators in most cases involving regulations of the economy. By the time of
World War I, a group of “progressive” intellectuals had become attracted to the principle of judicial deference enunciated in Holmes's
Lochner dissent, and to Holmes himself. By the 1930s, judicial deference to legislatures in the economic arena had become orthodoxy, with Holmes lionized as a “progressive” and “liberal” judge. At his ninetieth birthday in 1931, when he was still active on the Court, he was honored in a nationwide radio broadcast.
A second source of Holmes's attractiveness as a judge to early twentieth‐century commentators was his increasingly protective attitude toward freedom of speech. In a series of decisions extending from the World War I era to his retirement in 1932, Holmes reversed his normal deferential stance toward regulatory legislation and insisted that even “freedom for the thought we hate” be given constitutional protection. Although his free‐speech decisions resist being associated with any consistent doctrinal theory, in the main they affirmed the proposition that unfettered speech is indispensable to a democratic society.
Holmes's own views had little in common with the political radicals whose speech he protected or with the legislators who sought to alleviate market inequalities. He remained a nineteenth‐century Brahmin, conservative in his social instincts and doubtful that economic tinkering did much good. But his eloquent pronouncements on behalf of free speech and judicial deference in the realm of political economy—propositions that remained jurisprudential orthodoxy from the 1930s through the 1970s—made him an attractive figure to commentators long after his death. So did his arresting prose style, his academic contributions, his philosophical insight, and the memorable length of his career.
See also
Bill of Rights;
Civil Liberties;
Conservatism;
Economic Regulation;
Jurisprudence;
Liberalism.
Bibliography
G. Edward White , Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self, 1993.
G. Edward White
