Everything about Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr totally explained
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (
March 8,
1841 –
March 6,
1935) was an
American jurist who served on the
Supreme Court of the United States from 1902 to 1932. Noted for his long service, his concise and pithy opinions, and his deference to the decisions of elected
legislatures, he's one of the most widely cited United States Supreme Court justices in history, particularly for his "
clear and present danger" majority opinion in the 1919 case of
Schenck v. United States, as well as one of the most influential American
common-law judges.
Early life
Holmes was born in
Boston,
Massachusetts, the son of the prominent
writer and
physician Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. and
abolitionist Amelia Lee Jackson. As a young man, Holmes loved literature and supported the abolitionist movement that thrived in Boston society during the
1850s. He graduated from
Harvard University in 1861.
Civil War
During his senior year of college, at the outset of the
American Civil War, Holmes enlisted in the fourth battalion,
Massachusetts militia, and then received a commission as first lieutenant in the Twentieth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. He saw much action, from the
Peninsula Campaign to the
Wilderness, suffering wounds at the
Battle of Ball's Bluff,
Antietam, and
Fredericksburg. He is also said to have shouted at
Lincoln during the
Battle of Fort Stevens, saying "Get down, you fool!" when Lincoln stood, making him a susceptible target. He was mustered out in 1864 as a
brevet Lieutenant Colonel after his three-year enlistment ended. Holmes emerged from the war convinced that government and laws were founded on violence, a belief that he later developed into a
positivist view of law and a rejection of
romanticism and
natural rights theory. After his death two uniforms were discovered in his closet with a note attached to them reading, "These uniforms were worn by me in the Civil War and the stains upon them are my blood."
Legal career
State Judgeship
After the war's conclusion, Holmes returned to Harvard to study
law. He was admitted to the bar in 1866, and went into practice in Boston. He joined a small firm, and married a childhood friend, Fanny Dixwell. Their marriage lasted until her death on April 30, 1929. They never had children together. They did adopt and raise an orphaned cousin, Dorothy Upham. Mrs. Holmes was described as devoted, witty, wise, tactful, and perceptive.
Whenever he could, Holmes visited London during the social season of spring and summer. He formed his closest friendships with men and women there, and became one of the founders of what was soon called the “sociological” school of jurisprudence in Great Britain, which would be followed a generation later by the “legal realist” school in America.
Holmes practiced
admiralty law and commercial law in Boston for fifteen years. In 1870, Holmes became an editor of the
American Law Review, edited a new edition of Kent's Commentaries on American Law, and published numerous articles on the
common law. In 1881, he published the first edition of his well-regarded book
The Common Law, in which he summarized the views developed in the preceding years. This remains the only important work of American jurisprudence written by a practicing attorney. In the book, Holmes sets forth his view that the only source of law, properly speaking, is a judicial decision. Judges decide cases on the facts, and then write opinions afterward presenting a rationale for their decision. The true basis of the decision, however, is often an "inarticulate major premise" outside the law. A judge is obliged to choose between contending legal theories, and the true basis of his decision is necessarily drawn from outside the law. These views endeared Holmes to the later advocates of
legal realism and made him one of the early founders of
law and economics jurisprudence.
Holmes was considered for a judgeship on a federal court in 1878 by
President Rutherford B. Hayes, but Massachusetts Senator
George Frisbie Hoar convinced Hayes to nominate another candidate. In 1882, Holmes became both a professor at
Harvard Law School and then a justice of the
Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, resigning from the law school shortly after his appointment. He succeeded Justice
Horace Gray, whom Holmes coincidentally would replace once again when Gray retired from the U.S. Supreme Court in 1902. In 1899, Holmes was appointed
Chief Justice of the court.
During his service on the Massachusetts court, Holmes continued to develop and apply his views of the common law, usually following precedent faithfully. He issued few constitutional opinions in these years, but carefully developed the principles of free expression as a common-law doctrine. He departed from precedent to recognize workers' right to organize
trade unions as long as no violence or
coercion was involved, stating in his opinions that fundamental fairness required that workers be allowed to combine to compete on an equal footing with employers.
Supreme Court
On
August 11,
1902, President
Theodore Roosevelt named Holmes to the
United States Supreme Court on the recommendation of Senator
Henry Cabot Lodge (Roosevelt reportedly admired Holmes's "Soldier's Faith" speech as well). The Senate unanimously confirmed the appointment on
December 4, and Holmes took his seat on the Court
December 8,
1902. Holmes succeeded Justice Horace Gray, who had retired in July 1902 as a result of illness. According to some accounts, Holmes assured Roosevelt that he'd vote to sustain the administration's position that not all the provisions of the
United States Constitution applied to possessions acquired from Spain, an important question on which the Court was then evenly divided. On the bench, Holmes did vote to support the administration's position in "The
Insular Cases." However, he later disappointed Roosevelt by dissenting in
The Northern Securities Case, a major
antitrust prosecution (
Text of the U.S. Supreme Court finding
).
Holmes was known for his pithy, short, and frequently quoted opinions. In more than thirty years on the Supreme Court bench he considered the whole range of federal law, and is remembered for prescient opinions on topics as widely separated as copyright, the law of contempt, the anti-trust status of professional baseball, and the oath required for citizenship. Holmes, like most of his contemporaries, viewed the
Bill of Rights as codifying privileges obtained over the centuries in English and American law. Beginning with his first opinion for the Court, in
Otis v. Parker, Holmes declared that "
due process of law," the fundamental principle of fairness, protected people from unreasonable legislation, but was limited to only those fundamental principles enshrined in the common law and didn't protect most economic interests. In a series of opinions during and after the First World War, he held that the freedom of expression guaranteed by federal and state constitutions simply declared a common-law privilege to do harm, except in cases where the expression, in the circumstances in which it was uttered, posed a "clear and present danger" of causing some harm that the legislature had properly forbidden. In
Schenck v. United States, Holmes announced this doctrine for a unanimous Court, famously declaring that the First Amendment wouldn't protect a person "falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."
The following year, in
Abrams v. United States, Holmes delivered a strongly worded dissent in which he criticized the majority's use of the clear and present danger test, arguing that protests by political dissidents posed no actual risk of interfering with war effort. In his dissent, he accused the Court of punishing the defendants for their opinions rather than their acts. Although Holmes evidently believed that he was adhering to his own precedent, many later commentators accused Holmes of inconsistency, even of seeking to curry favor with his young admirers. The Supreme Court departed from his views where the validity of a statute was in question, adopting the principle that a legislature could properly declare that some forms of speech posed a clear and present danger, regardless of the circumstances in which they were uttered.
Holmes was criticized during his lifetime and afterward for his philosophical views, which his opponents characterized as
moral relativism. Holmes's critics believe that he saw few restraints on the power of a governing class to enact its interests into law. They assert that his moral relativism influenced him not only to support a broad reading of the constitutional guarantee of "freedom of speech," but also led him to write an opinion for the Court upholding Virginia's compulsory sterilization law in
Buck v. Bell,
274 U.S. 200 (
1927), where he found no constitutional bar to state-ordered
compulsory sterilization of an institutionalized, allegedly "feeble-minded" woman. Using words described by constitutional scholar
Erwin Chemerinsky as "some of the most offensive language found anywhere in the
United States Reports," Holmes wrote,"It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind . . . three generations of imbeciles is enough." While his opposition points to this case as an extreme example of his moral relativism, other legal observers argue that this was a consistent extension of his own version of strict
utilitarianism, which weighed the morality of policies according to their overall measurable consequences in society and not according to their own normative worth.
Holmes was admired by the Progressives of his day who concurred in his narrow reading of "due process." He regularly dissented when the Court invoked due process to strike down economic legislation, most famously in the 1905 case of
Lochner v. New York. Holmes's dissent in that case, in which he wrote that "a Constitution isn't intended to embody a particular economic theory," is one of the most-quoted in Supreme Court history. However, Holmes wrote the opinion of the Court in the
Pennsylvania Coal v. Mahon case which inaugurated regulatory takings jurisprudence in holding a Pennsylvania regulatory statute constituted a taking of private property. His dissenting opinions on behalf of freedom of expression were celebrated by opponents of the Red Scare and prosecutions of political dissidents that began during World War I. Holmes's personal views on economics were influenced by
Malthusian theories that emphasized struggle for a fixed amount of resources, however, he didn't share the young Progressive's ameliorist views.
Holmes served until
January 12,
1932, when his brethren on the court, citing his advanced age (Holmes was, at 90, the oldest serving justice in the Court's history), suggested that he step down. He died of
pneumonia in
Washington, D.C. in 1935, two days short of his 94th birthday, leaving his residuary estate to the United States government (he had earlier said that "
taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society"). He was buried in
Arlington National Cemetery, and is commonly recognized as one of the greatest justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Holmes's papers, donated to Harvard Law School, were kept closed for many years after his death, a circumstance that gave rise to numerous speculative and fictionalized accounts of his life. Catherine Drinker Bowen's fictionalized biography "Yankee from Olympus" was a long-time bestseller, and the 1951
Hollywood motion picture The Magnificent Yankee was based on a highly fictionalized
play about Holmes's life. Since the opening of the extensive Holmes papers in the 1980s, however, there has been a series of more accurate biographies and scholarly monographs.
Theatre, film, television and fictional portrayals
American actor
Louis Calhern portrayed Holmes in the
1946 play
The Magnificent Yankee, with
Dorothy Gish as Holmes's wife, and in
1950, Calhern repeated his performance in
MGM's film version, for which he received his only
Academy Award nomination.
Ann Harding co-starred in the film. A
1965 television adaptation of the play starred
Alfred Lunt and
Lynn Fontanne in one of their few appearances on the small screen.
Holmes is featured in the following passage by Isaac Asimov:
Berke Breathed's political comic strip
Bloom County,
Oliver Wendell Jones, is based on that of Holmes.
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