HOLMES, OLIVER WENDELL, JR.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (March 8, 1841–March 6, 1935) was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His father was a physician and literary figure; his mother, Amelia Lee Jackson, a prominent society leader active in charitable causes. Holmes's mother, to whom the future Supreme Court justice bore a close physical resemblance, was the daughter of a prominent Boston lawyer and judge. Holmes attended private schools and Harvard but he benefited especially from the strong intellectual influence of his parents, whose visitors regularly included major writers and thinkers of the day.
A student at Harvard when the nation erupted in civil war, Holmes promptly enlisted in the infantry, graduated from college, and was given a commission as a second lieutenant. As a member of the Army of the Potomac, he developed an impressive record and was injured in combat on three occasions. When his injuries forced his resignation from the service in 1864, he held the rank of captain.
On returning to Boston, Holmes attended Harvard Law School, then toured Great Britain and the continent of Europe to complete his education. A clerkship in Boston and admission to the bar in 1867 followed. In 1872, Holmes married his childhood friend Fanny Dixwell and joined a Boston firm specializing in commercial and admiralty law. But he also had an enduring interest in legal scholarship, and in 1881, a few days before his fortieth birthday, his Lowell Lectures in Boston were published as a book. The Common Law would become one of the most influential studies of its kind, exerting a major impact on the development of the sociological and legal realist schools of jurisprudence.
Following publication of The Common Law, Holmes taught a semester at Harvard University, then accepted an appointment as a justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, on which he served twenty years, becoming its chief justice in 1899.
In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Holmes to a seat on the United States Supreme Court. In his scholarly writings, Holmes had stressed the degree to which judges' life experiences, rather than logic, guided their decisions. As a justice, however, he generally opposed judicial interference with legislative judgments, especially in regulatory cases. Dissenting in Lochner v. New York (1905) and related cases, striking down maximum
hour (Lochner), minimum wage, and other state and federal regulations, he attacked the Court's use of substantive due process as a weapon against economic legislation. Personally, he was skeptical of government efforts to control the economy. But in his view such decisions rested with legislators and the electorate, not with the courts.
Holmes usually gave non-economic substantive guarantees a narrow reading as well, refusing to equate laws forbidding tenant farmers to break their labor contracts with involuntary servitude. But the version of the clear and present danger test he ultimately embraced in Abrams v. United States (1919) and other World War I dissents was clearly more protective of free speech than the majority interpretation of the First Amendment in that era. He also joined Justice Louis Brandeis's dissent in Olmstead v. United States (1928), declaring that wiretapping should be subjected to Fourth Amendment requirements.
When Chief Justice William Howard Taft resigned from the bench in 1930, Holmes thrived in his brief role as acting chief justice. He also continued to challenge the Court's growing body of rulings restricting federal and state regulatory authority. When a majority, in Farmers Loan and Trust Co. v. Minnesota (1930), overturned his opinion generously construing state tax power in Blackstone v. Miller (1903), the justice dissented, expressing his "anxiety" over the Court's further encroachment on "the Constitutional rights of the States."
After Holmes' beloved wife Fanny died in 1929, however, his own health had begun to decline, as had his ability to keep abreast of the Court's work. In 1932, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes visited his home, explaining that a majority of the Court had asked Hughes to suggest that Holmes resign. Without apparent opposition or resentment, Holmes complied, sending the president his retirement letter on January 12, 1932. In 1935, he died at his home in Washington. He had served thirty years on the bench, under four chief justices. He is remembered as one of the Court's most outstanding jurists.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alschuler, Albert W. Law without Values: The Life, Work, and Legacy of Justice Holmes. 2000.
Baker, Liva. The Justice from Beacon Hill: The Life and Times of Oliver Wendell Holmes. 1991.
Novick, Sheldon M. Honorable Justice: The Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes. 1989.
White, G. Edward. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self. 1993.
