# Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. *American jurist; associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, 1902–1932* Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (March 8, 1841 – March 6, 1935) was an American jurist. He sat as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932.[^1] Before that he was an associate justice and then chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and Weld Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, from which he had graduated. Earlier still he fought for the Union in the American Civil War, rising to brevet colonel and taking three wounds.[^1] President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1902. On that Court he upheld state economic regulation as constitutional. From 1919 he wrote opinions on freedom of speech under the First Amendment, first in *Schenck v. United States* and then in a dissent in *Abrams v. United States*.[^2] The Wikipedia account counts him among the most cited and influential justices in the Court's history. It also reports that the *University of Chicago Law Review* has ranked him sixth among the most-cited American legal scholars.[^3] Holmes left the bench on January 12, 1932. He was then 90 years and 10 months old, older than any justice before him in the Court's history. He died in Washington on March 6, 1935.[^4] ## Early life Holmes was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His father was Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., a writer and physician, and his mother was Amelia Lee Jackson Holmes.[^5] While an undergraduate at Harvard he was an abolitionist, and on one occasion he acted as bodyguard to the abolitionist Wendell Phillips.[^5] He finished at Harvard in 1861, Phi Beta Kappa and cum laude. That spring Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter and President [[Abraham Lincoln]] called for volunteers. Holmes joined the Massachusetts militia.[^5] ## Legal career Holmes came back to the family home in Boston in the summer of 1864. That fall he entered Harvard Law School. He attended lectures for one year and then spent a year clerking in the office of his cousin Robert Morse.[^6] In 1866 he took a Bachelor of Laws degree from Harvard and was admitted to the Massachusetts bar. After an extended stay in London he began practicing with a small Boston firm.[^6] In 1872 he married Fanny Bowditch Dixwell, a friend since childhood. The next year they bought a farm in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts. The couple had no children of their own, but they raised Dorothy Upham, an orphaned cousin. The marriage ended with Fanny Holmes's death on April 30, 1929.[^6] ## Supreme Court Justice Associate Justice [[Horace Gray]] died in July 1902. Roosevelt then announced that he meant to name Holmes to the seat, and said he wanted a successor from Massachusetts.[^7] The state's two senators split on the nomination. Henry Cabot Lodge, the junior senator, backed it. George Frisbie Hoar, the senior senator and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, opposed it.[^7] The account ties the split to annexation. Hoar opposed imperialism, while Lodge and Roosevelt supported it. The legality of annexing Puerto Rico and the Philippines was expected to come before the Court, and Holmes was expected to back the administration.[^7] Roosevelt formally submitted the nomination on December 2, 1902. The [[United States Senate]] confirmed Holmes on December 4, and he took the oath on December 8.[^8] In the *Insular Cases*, Holmes voted for the administration's position on annexing former Spanish colonies.[^9] In *Northern Securities Co. v. United States*, an antitrust prosecution, he dissented. The majority agreed with the government that Northern Securities had violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. The Wikipedia account states that the dissent permanently damaged his relationship with Roosevelt.[^9] Over more than twenty-nine years on the Court he ruled across a wide range of federal law. His opinions included cases on copyright, the law of contempt, and the antitrust status of professional baseball.[^9] In *Schenck v. United States* (1919), Holmes wrote for a unanimous Court upholding criminal sanctions against draft protestors. That opinion stated that "free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic". It also set out the "clear and present danger" test.[^10] Later in 1919 he dissented in *Abrams v. United States*. There he wrote that "the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market". He also urged vigilance "against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death".[^10] In *Compañia General de Tabacos de Filipinas v. Collector of Internal Revenue*, 275 U.S. 87, 100 (1927), he wrote that "taxes are what we pay for civilized society".[^11] ## Jurisprudential contributions In his 1881 book *The Common Law*, Holmes argued that legal rules come out of an active process of human self-government, not formal logic. His best-known statement of the point is "The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience".[^12] This view broke with legal formalism, the dominant school of the time. Formalism treated law as an ordered system of rules from which the outcome of a particular case could be deduced.[^12] The Wikipedia account calls Holmes a legal realist, a moral skeptic and an opponent of natural law doctrine.[^3] It also notes that he has been grouped with the philosophic pragmatists. It qualifies this by saying that Holmes attributed pragmatism to the law itself rather than to his own philosophy.[^12] In his account of the evolving common law, a judge decides which of two parties bears the cost of an injury. Liability falls on the person whose conduct did not show the prudence of a "reasonable man".[^12] ## Speeches and letters During Holmes's life and in the first years after his death, only his legal writings were readily available. More than two thousand of his letters survive.[^13] His executor, John Gorham Palfrey, gathered his published and unpublished papers. Palfrey gave them, with their copyrights, to Harvard Law School.[^13] Harvard Law professor Mark DeWolfe Howe was authorized to edit the papers. He published several volumes of letters, starting with Holmes's correspondence with Frederick Pollock, and a volume of speeches.[^13] All of Holmes's speeches appear in the third volume of *The Collected Works of Justice Holmes*.[^13] ## Retirement, death, honors and legacy On Holmes's ninetieth birthday, he was honored on one of the first radio broadcasts carried coast to coast. Chief Justice [[Charles Evans Hughes]], Yale Law School dean Charles Edward Clark and the president of the American Bar Association read tributes.[^14] On January 12, 1932, his fellow justices cited his age and suggested it was time for him to step down, and he left the bench that day.[^4] His age record has been approached only by [[John Paul Stevens]]. Stevens retired in 2010 at an age 8 months short of Holmes's.[^4] On Holmes's ninety-second birthday, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, newly inaugurated, and Eleanor Roosevelt visited him at his Washington home.[^14] Holmes died of pneumonia two days before his 94th birthday. He was the last surviving justice of the Fuller Court.[^14] His will left his residuary estate to the United States government.[^11] He is buried next to his wife in Arlington National Cemetery.[^14] The United States Postal Service later issued a 15¢ stamp of Holmes in its Prominent Americans series (1965–1978).[^14] ## Clerks Holmes's former clerks included the following:[^15] - Thomas Corcoran - Laurence Curtis, later a U.S. Representative - Alger Hiss, later president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, whom the account describes as a convicted perjurer - Donald Hiss, later a partner at Covington & Burling - Irving Sands Olds, later chairman of U.S. Steel - H. Chapman Rose, later Undersecretary of the United States Treasury ## In popular culture Louis Calhern played Holmes in the 1946 play *The Magnificent Yankee*. He played the role again in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's 1950 film version, which earned him an Academy Award nomination.[^16] Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne starred in a 1965 television adaptation.[^16] Catherine Drinker Bowen's *Yankee from Olympus: Justice Holmes and His Family* (1944) is a fictionalized biography. *Holmes*, a staged reading written by Todd C. Peppers, premiered at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., on October 30, 2023.[^16] ## Notes [^1]: Wikipedia contributors, *Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.*, lead section (revision 1380698789, retrieved 2026-10-26) — dates of birth and death, Supreme Court tenure, Massachusetts judicial offices, Weld professorship, Civil War service. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Wendell_Holmes_Jr.> [^2]: Wikipedia contributors, *Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.*, lead section (revision 1380698789, retrieved 2026-10-26) — 1902 appointment by Theodore Roosevelt, state economic regulation, First Amendment opinions of 1919. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Wendell_Holmes_Jr.> [^3]: Wikipedia contributors, *Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.*, lead section (revision 1380698789, retrieved 2026-10-26) — citation ranking, *University of Chicago Law Review* figure, legal realism, moral skepticism, opposition to natural law. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Wendell_Holmes_Jr.> [^4]: Wikipedia contributors, *Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.*, section *Retirement, death, honors and legacy* (revision 1380698789, retrieved 2026-10-26) — retirement on January 12, 1932, age record, Stevens comparison, death date. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Wendell_Holmes_Jr.> [^5]: Wikipedia contributors, *Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.*, section *Early life* (revision 1380698789, retrieved 2026-10-26) — birth and parentage, abolitionism at Harvard, 1861 graduation, militia enlistment. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Wendell_Holmes_Jr.> [^6]: Wikipedia contributors, *Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.*, section *Legal career* (revision 1380698789, retrieved 2026-10-26) — 1864 enrollment, 1866 LL.B. and bar admission, 1872 marriage, death of Fanny Holmes on April 30, 1929. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Wendell_Holmes_Jr.> [^7]: Wikipedia contributors, *Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.*, section *Supreme Court Justice* (revision 1380698789, retrieved 2026-10-26) — Gray vacancy of July 1902, Lodge support, Hoar opposition, annexation question. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Wendell_Holmes_Jr.> [^8]: Wikipedia contributors, *Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.*, section *Supreme Court Justice* (revision 1380698789, retrieved 2026-10-26) — nomination on December 2, confirmation on December 4, swearing-in on December 8, 1902. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Wendell_Holmes_Jr.> [^9]: Wikipedia contributors, *Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.*, section *Supreme Court Justice* (revision 1380698789, retrieved 2026-10-26) — *Insular Cases* vote, *Northern Securities* dissent, range of opinions over more than twenty-nine years. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Wendell_Holmes_Jr.> [^10]: Wikipedia contributors, *Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.*, lead section (revision 1380698789, retrieved 2026-10-26) — *Schenck* holding and quotations, "clear and present danger" test, *Abrams* dissent quotations. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Wendell_Holmes_Jr.> [^11]: Wikipedia contributors, *Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.*, section *Retirement, death, honors and legacy* (revision 1380698789, retrieved 2026-10-26) — residuary estate bequest, 275 U.S. 87, 100 (1927) quotation. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Wendell_Holmes_Jr.> [^12]: Wikipedia contributors, *Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.*, section *Jurisprudential contributions* (revision 1380698789, retrieved 2026-10-26) — *The Common Law* (1881), break with formalism, pragmatism qualification, "reasonable man" standard. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Wendell_Holmes_Jr.> [^13]: Wikipedia contributors, *Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.*, section *Speeches and letters* (revision 1380698789, retrieved 2026-10-26) — surviving letters, Palfrey donation, Howe editions, *Collected Works* vol. 3. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Wendell_Holmes_Jr.> [^14]: Wikipedia contributors, *Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.*, section *Retirement, death, honors and legacy* (revision 1380698789, retrieved 2026-10-26) — ninetieth-birthday broadcast, Roosevelt visit, cause of death, Fuller Court, burial, postage stamp. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Wendell_Holmes_Jr.> [^15]: Wikipedia contributors, *Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.*, section *Clerks* (revision 1380698789, retrieved 2026-10-26) — list of former clerks and their later positions. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Wendell_Holmes_Jr.> [^16]: Wikipedia contributors, *Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.*, section *In popular culture* (revision 1380698789, retrieved 2026-10-26) — 1946 play, 1950 film, 1965 television adaptation, 1944 biography, 2023 staged reading. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Wendell_Holmes_Jr.>