Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Lore & Background

Holmes was born in Boston to the prominent writer and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and Amelia Lee Jackson Holmes. He grew up surrounded by Boston’s intellectual and literary elite; family friends included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry James Sr. During the American Civil War, he enlisted in the Massachusetts militia and later received a commission as a second lieutenant in the Twentieth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. He saw heavy combat, participating in the Peninsula Campaign and the Battle of the Wilderness, and was wounded three times—at Ball’s Bluff, Antietam, and Chancellorsville—also suffering a near-fatal case of dysentery. He rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel but declined command of his regiment, which was later taken by a fellow officer who was killed. After recovering from his third wound, Holmes served as an aide-de-camp to General Horatio Wright during Grant’s campaign to Petersburg and returned to Washington when the capital was threatened in July 1864. He was mustered out at the end of his enlistment that same month. Holmes later served as an associate justice and chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and as Weld Professor of Law at Harvard Law School before being appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902. He served until 1932, retiring at age 90—the oldest justice in the Court’s history. Known for his pithy opinions and distinctive writing style, he became a popular figure, especially among American progressives. His jurisprudence emphasized deference to elected legislatures and a “clear and present danger” test for free speech, famously arguing that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” A legal realist, he rejected natural law and moral absolutism, asserting that “the life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.”

Reader's Guide

Holmes's significance lies in his influential tenure on the U.S. Supreme Court and his contributions to American legal thought. In Schenck v. Later that year, in his dissent in Abrams v. United States, he argued that 'the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.' His legal realism, summed up in his maxim 'The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience,' influenced subsequent American legal thinking, including the judicial consensus upholding New Deal regulatory law, sociological jurisprudence, and Legal Realism. The University of Chicago Law Review identified him as the sixth-most-cited American legal scholar of all time.

Did You Know?

• Holmes was wounded three times during the American Civil War, at the Battles of Ball's Bluff, Antietam, and Chancellorsville.
• Holmes was a legal realist and moral skeptic who opposed the doctrine of natural law.