Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (born March 8, 1841, Boston—died March 6, 1935, Washington, D.C.) was an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, U.S. legal historian and philosopher who advocated judicial restraint. He stated the concept of “clear and present danger” as the only basis for limiting the right of freedom of speech.

Early life and Civil War experience

Holmes was the first child of the celebrated writer and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes. The family background on both sides represented the New England “aristocracy” of character and accomplishment. His father was descended from the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet; he married Amelia Lee Jackson, whose father, Charles, was a justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of the State of Massachusetts, a bench on which Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was to sit for 20 years. He was proud of this heritage and spoke of it often. It helped shape his mind and character.

Young Holmes went to a private school and then to Harvard College. He was graduated in the class of 1861 and, like his father before him, was class poet. At the outbreak of the American Civil War he enlisted as a private in the 4th Battalion of Infantry and began training at Boston’s Fort Independence, not expecting to finish the academic year or take his degree. The battalion was not called up, and after graduation the young man applied for and received, in July, a commission as first lieutenant in the 20th Massachusetts Regiment of Volunteers. He was 20 years old at that time.

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His letters and diary give vivid pictures of his war experiences. He was seriously wounded three times, at the battles of Ball’s Bluff, Antietam, and Chancellorsville. He left the army after three years, having been commissioned lieutenant colonel although mustered out with the rank of captain. Holmes described war as “an organized bore.” He said, “I trust I did my duty as a soldier respectably, but I was not born for it and did nothing remarkable in that way.” In a Memorial Day address to fellow veterans, in 1884, he attributed a certain value to the war experience: “Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.” This is an aspect of his conviction that “it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged never to have lived.”

Legal studies

In the autumn of 1864 he entered Harvard Law School, ironically without any clear sense of vocation. He had even contemplated medicine, to which his father objected. On different occasions, he said that his “Governor” “put on the screws to have me go to the Law School” or “kicked” him into it. There is a story that, when young Holmes announced to his father the decision to enter the law school, the doctor said, “What’s the use of that, Wendell? A lawyer can’t be a great man.” There was not a deep affinity between father and son. The little doctor’s puns and quips, his easy display of emotion, and a somewhat patronizing attitude chafed the tall, less talkative, inherently shy law student. The philosopher William James, perhaps the closest friend of Wendell in the immediate postwar years, once remarked that “no love is lost” between father and son.

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Holmes experienced a certain restlessness in law school, finding the tradition of the law as presented in an uninspired curriculum to be stagnant and narrowly precedent-centered. The science, philosophy, or history of law were slighted, and these, rather than what he later called “the small change of legal thought,” were what captured Holmes’s mind and drew him into the depths of a profession toward which at first he had not felt a powerful incentive.

After finishing law school in 1866 he made the conventional “pilgrimage” abroad, visiting England, France, and Switzerland and meeting a variety of distinguished men. He was admitted to the bar in 1867 and for 15 years practiced law as a member of several firms. From 1870 to 1873 he was an editor of the American Law Review. He edited the 12th edition of the classic survey Commentaries on American Law (1873), by Chancellor James Kent (1763–1847). He also lectured at Harvard on law.

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During this busy time he was engaged in courtship. Always something of a ladies’ man, he had maintained a long friendship with Fanny Bowditch Dixwell, daughter of his onetime schoolmaster. She had waited patiently through wartime, his law studies, travel, and apprenticeship. Holmes and Dixwell were married at last on June 17, 1872. The marriage, happy and long lasting, was childless.