Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Civil War

During his senior year of college, at the outset of the American Civil War, Holmes enlisted in the Fourth Battalion of Infantry in the Massachusetts militia, then in July 1861, with his father's help, received a commission as second lieutenant in the Twentieth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.^[13] He saw considerable combat during his service, taking part in the Peninsula Campaign, and the Wilderness, suffering wounds at the Battle of Ball's Bluff, Antietam, and Chancellorsville, and suffered from a near-fatal case of dysentery. He particularly admired and was close to Henry Livermore Abbott, a fellow officer in the 20th Massachusetts. Holmes rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, but eschewed command of his regiment upon his promotion. Abbott took command of the regiment in his place and was later killed.^{[citation needed]}

In September 1863, while recovering at the Holmes family home on Charles Street in Boston from his third major combat injury, Holmes was promoted to colonel, but he never returned to the 20th Massachusetts because the unit had been largely destroyed. Upon his recovery, in January 1864 Holmes was appointed aide-de-camp of General Horatio Wright, then Division Commander of VI Corps, and later in command of the Corps. Holmes served with Wright during General Grant's campaign down to Petersburg, returning to Washington with the Sixth Corps when the Capital was threatened in July 1864. On July 17, 1864, Holmes was mustered out at the end of his enlistment term, returning to Boston and enrolling at Harvard Law School later that year.^[13]

Holmes is said to have shouted to Abraham Lincoln to take cover during the Battle of Fort Stevens, although this is commonly regarded as apocryphal.^{[14][15][16][17]} Holmes himself expressed uncertainty about who had warned Lincoln ("Some say it was an enlisted man who shouted at Lincoln; others suggest it was General Wright who brusquely ordered Lincoln to safety. But for a certainty, the 6 foot 4 inch Lincoln, in frock coat and top hat, stood peering through field glasses from behind a parapet at the onrushing rebels.")^[18] and other sources state he likely was not present on the day Lincoln visited Fort Stevens.^[19]

Lawyer

In the summer of 1864, Holmes returned to the family home in Boston, wrote poetry, and debated philosophy with his friend William James, pursuing his debate with philosophic idealism, and considered re-enlisting. By the fall, when it became clear that the war would soon end, Holmes enrolled in Harvard Law School, "kicked into the law" by his father, as he later recalled.^[20] He attended lectures there for a single year, reading extensively in theoretical works, and then clerked for a year in his cousin Robert Morse's office. In 1866, he received a Bachelor of Laws degree from Harvard, was admitted to the Massachusetts bar, and after a long visit to London to complete his education went into law practice in Boston. He joined a small firm, and in 1872 married a childhood friend, Fanny Bowditch Dixwell, buying a farm in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, the following year.^[21] Their marriage lasted until her death on April 30, 1929. They never had children. They did adopt and raise an orphaned cousin, Dorothy Upham. Fanny "had a charming public persona. She could also be quiet and unassuming.... She was essentially a shy and private woman [and] stand-offish.... As she grew older, her inclination to solitude became more pronounced, and in time she became a virtual recluse...".^[22]

Whenever he could, Holmes visited London during the social season of spring and summer, and during his years as a lawyer and judge in Boston he formed romantic friendships with English women of the nobility, with whom he corresponded while at home in the United States. The most important of these was his friendship with the Anglo-Irish Clare Castletown, the Lady Castletown, whose family estate in Ireland, Doneraile Court, he visited several times, and with whom he may have had a brief affair.^[23][24] He formed his closest intellectual friendships with British men and became one of the founders of what was soon called the "sociological" school of jurisprudence in Great Britain, followed a generation later by the "legal realist" school in America.^{[citation needed]}

Holmes practiced admiralty law and commercial law in Boston for fifteen years. It was during this time that he did his principal scholarly work, serving as an editor of the new American Law Review, reporting decisions of state supreme courts, and preparing a new edition of Kent's Commentaries, which served practitioners as a compendium of case law, at a time when official reports were scarce and difficult to obtain. He summarized his hard-won understanding in a series of lectures, collected and published as The Common Law in 1881.^{[citation needed]}

The Common Law

The Common Law has been continuously in print since 1881 and remains an important contribution to jurisprudence. The book also remains controversial, for Holmes begins by rejecting various kinds of formalism in law. In his earlier writings he had expressly denied the utilitarian view that law was a set of commands of the sovereign, rules of conduct that became legal duties. He rejected as well the views of the German idealist philosophers, whose views were then widely held, and the philosophy taught at Harvard, that the opinions of judges could be harmonized in a purely logical system. In the opening paragraphs of the book, he famously summarized his own view of the history of the common law:

The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.^[6]

In The Common Law, Holmes wrote that, even though the law "uses the language of morality, it necessarily ends in external standards not dependent on the consciousness of the individual" or on his moral culpability. Foreseeability of harm was the key: "the general basis of criminal liability was knowledge, at the time of action, of facts from which common experience showed that certain harmful results were likely to follow."^[25] Tort liability, similarly, was imposed when circumstances were "such as would have led a prudent man to perceive danger, although not necessarily to foresee the specific harm".^[26] Likewise, with respect to contracts, "The law has nothing to do with the actual state of the parties' minds. In contract, as elsewhere, it must go by externals, and judge parties by their conduct."^[27]

In the book, Holmes set forth his view that the only source of law, properly speaking, was a judicial decision enforced by the state. Judges decided cases on the facts, and then wrote opinions afterward presenting a rationale for their decision. The true basis of the decision was often an "inarticulate major premise", however. A judge was obliged to choose between contending legal arguments, each posed in absolute terms, and the true basis of his decision was sometimes drawn from outside the law, when precedents were lacking or were evenly divided.^{[citation needed]}

The common law evolves because civilized society evolves, and judges share the common preconceptions of the governing class. 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 famously contrasted his own scholarship with the abstract doctrines of Christopher Columbus Langdell, dean of Harvard Law School, who viewed the common law as a self-enclosed set of doctrines. Holmes viewed Langdell's work as akin to the German philosophic idealism he had for so long resisted, opposing it with his own scientific materialism.^[28] Albert Alschuler, however, wrote, "Langdell was innocent of the charge ... of attempting to deduce law from a priori premises".^[29]

State court judge

Holmes was considered for a federal court judgeship in 1878 by President Rutherford B. Hayes, but Massachusetts Senator George Frisbie Hoar persuaded Hayes to nominate another candidate. In the fall of 1882, Holmes became a professor at Harvard Law School, accepting an endowed professorship that had been created for him, largely through the efforts of Louis D. Brandeis. On Friday, December 8, 1882, Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts associate justice Otis Lord decided to resign, giving outgoing Republican governor John Davis Long a chance to appoint his successor, if he could do so before the Massachusetts Governor's Council adjourned at 3 pm. Holmes's partner George Shattuck proposed him for the vacancy, Holmes quickly agreed, and there being no objection by the council, he took the oath of office on December 15, 1882. His resignation from his professorship, after only a few weeks and without notice, was resented by the law school faculty, with James Bradley Thayer finding Holmes's conduct "selfish" and "thoughtless".^[30] On August 2, 1899, Holmes became chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court following the death of Walbridge A. Field.

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 and to strike, as long as no violence was involved, and coercion was not exerted through impermissible means such as secondary boycotts, stating in his opinions that fundamental fairness required that workers be allowed to combine to compete on an equal footing with employers. He continued to give speeches and to write articles that added to or extended his work on the common law, most notably "Privilege, Malice and Intent",^[31] in which he presented his view of the pragmatic basis of the common-law privileges extended to speech and the press, which could be defeated by a showing of malice, or of specific intent to harm.

Famously, he observed in McAuliffe v. Mayor of New Bedford (1892) that a policeman "may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman".^[32] He also published an address, "The Path of the Law",^[33] which is best known for its prediction theory of law, that "[t]he prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by law", and for its "bad man" perspective on the law, that "[i]f you really want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict".^[33]

Overview

Soon after the death of Associate Justice Horace Gray in July 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt made known his intention to appoint Holmes as Gray's successor; it was the president's stated desire to fill the vacancy with someone from Massachusetts.^[34] The nomination was supported by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the junior senator from Massachusetts, but was opposed by its senior senator, George Frisbie Hoar, who was also chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Hoar was a strenuous opponent of imperialism, and the legality of the annexation of Puerto Rico and the Philippines was expected to come before the Court. Lodge, like Roosevelt, was a strong supporter of imperialism, which Holmes was expected to support as well.^[35]

Despite Hoar's opposition, the president moved ahead on the matter. On December 2, 1902, he formally submitted the nomination and Holmes was confirmed by the United States Senate on December 4.^[36] He was sworn into office on December 8.^[1]

On the bench, Holmes did vote to support the administration's position favoring the annexation of former Spanish colonies in the "Insular Cases". However, he later disappointed Roosevelt by dissenting in Northern Securities Co. v. United States, a major antitrust prosecution;^[37] the majority of the court opposed Holmes and sided with Roosevelt's belief that Northern Securities violated the Sherman Antitrust Act.^[37] The dissent by Holmes permanently damaged his formerly close relationship with Roosevelt.^[38]

Holmes was known for his pithy, frequently quoted opinions. In more than twenty-nine years on the Supreme Court bench, he ruled on cases spanning the whole range of federal law. He is remembered for prescient opinions on topics as varied as copyright law, the law of contempt, the antitrust 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 common law, and he established that view in numerous opinions for the Court. He is considered one of the greatest judges in American history and embodies for many the traditions of the common law. A eugenicist, he authored the majority opinion upholding forced sterilization.^[39] Tens of thousands of the procedures followed.^[40]

From the departure of William Howard Taft on February 3, 1930, until Charles Evans Hughes became chief justice on February 24, 1930, Holmes briefly acted as the chief justice and presided over court sessions.^{[citation needed]}

Noteworthy Supreme Court opinions

Critique of formalism

From his earliest writings, Holmes demonstrated a lifelong belief that the decisions of judges were consciously or unconsciously result-oriented and reflected the mores of the class and society from which judges were drawn. In his 1881 book The Common Law,^[6] Holmes argued that legal rules are not deduced through formal logic but rather emerge from an active process of human self-government.^[56] He expressed this idea most famously in The Common Law with the statement, "The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience".^[6] His philosophy represented a departure from the prevailing jurisprudence of the time: legal formalism, which held that law was an orderly system of rules from which decisions in particular cases could be deduced.^[57] Holmes sought to consciously reinvent the common law – to modernize it as a tool for adjusting to the changing nature of modern life, as judges of the past had done more or less unconsciously.^[56] He has been classed with the philosophic pragmatists, although pragmatism is what he attributed to the law, rather than his personal philosophy.^[C]

Central to his thought was the notion that the law, as it had evolved in modern societies, was concerned with the material results of a defendant's actions. A judge's task was to decide which of two parties before him would bear the cost of an injury. Holmes argued that the evolving common law standard was that liability would fall upon a person whose conduct failed to reflect the prudence of a "reasonable man":

[I]f a workman on a house-top at mid-day ... throws down a heavy beam into the street, he does an act which a person of ordinary prudence would foresee is likely to cause death, or grievous bodily harm, and he is dealt with as if he foresaw it, whether he does so in fact or not. If a death is caused by the act, he is guilty of murder. But if the workman has a reasonable cause to believe that the space below is a private yard from which everyone is excluded, and which is used as a rubbish-heap, his act is not blameworthy, and the homicide is a mere misadventure.^[58]

This "objective standard" adopted by common-law judges, Holmes thought, reflected a shift in community standards, away from condemnation of a person's act toward an impersonal assessment of its value to the community. In the modern world, the advances made in biology and the social sciences should allow a better conscious determination of the results of individual acts and the proper measure of liability for them.^[59] This belief in the pronouncements of science concerning social welfare, although he later doubted its applicability to law in many cases, accounts for his enthusiastic endorsement of eugenics in his writings, and his opinion in the case of Buck v. Bell.^{[citation needed]}

Legal positivism

In 1881, in The Common Law, Holmes brought together into a coherent whole his earlier articles and lectures concerning the history of the common law (judicial decisions in England and the United States), which he interpreted from the perspective of a practicing lawyer. What counted as law, to a lawyer, was what judges did in particular cases. Law was what the state would enforce, through violence if necessary; echoes of his experience in the Civil War were often present in his writings. Judges decided where and when the force of the state would be brought to bear, and judges in the modern world tended to consult facts and consequences when deciding what conduct to punish. The decisions of judges, viewed over time, determined the rules of conduct and the legal duties by which all are bound. Judges did not and should not consult any external system of morality, certainly not a system imposed by a deity.^{[citation needed]}

Being a legal positivist, Holmes brought himself into constant conflict with scholars who believed that legal duties rested upon natural law, a moral order of the kind invoked by Christian theologians and other philosophic idealists. He believed instead "that men make their own laws; that these laws do not flow from some mysterious omnipresence in the sky, and that judges are not independent mouthpieces of the infinite."^[60]: 49 "The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky."^[61] Rather than a set of abstract, rational, mathematical, or in any way unworldly set of principles, Holmes said: "[T]he prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law."^[33]: 458

His belief that law, properly speaking, was a set of generalizations from what judges had done in similar cases, determined his view of the Constitution of the United States. As a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Holmes rejected the argument that the text of the Constitution should be applied directly to cases that came before the court, as if it were a statute. He shared with most of his fellow jurists the belief that the Constitution carried forward principles derived from the common law, principles that continued to evolve in American courts. The text of the Constitution itself, as originally understood, was not a set of rules, but only a directive to courts to consider the body of the common law when deciding cases that arose under the Constitution. It followed that constitutional principles adopted from the common law were evolving, as the law itself evolved: "A word [in the Constitution] is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought".^[62]

The provisions of the Constitution are not mathematical formulas that have their essence in form, they are organic, living institutions transplanted from English soil. Their significance is vital, not formal; it is to be gathered not simply by taking the words and a dictionary but by considering their origin and the line of their growth.^[63]

Holmes also insisted on the separation of "ought" and "is", confusion of which he saw as an obstacle in understanding the realities of the law.^[33]: 457 "The law is full of phraseology drawn from morals, and talks about rights and duties, malice, intent, and negligence – and nothing is easier in legal reasoning than to take these words in their moral sense".^{[60]: 40 [33]: 458} "Therefore nothing but confusion can result from assuming that the rights of man in a moral sense are equally rights in the sense of the Constitution and the law".^[60]: 40 Holmes said, "I think our morally tinted words have caused a great deal of confused thinking".^[64]: 179

Nevertheless, in rejecting morality as a form of natural law outside of and superior to human enactments, Holmes was not rejecting moral principles that were the result of enforceable law: "The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race. The practice of it, in spite of popular jests, tends to make good citizens and good men. When I emphasize the difference between law and morals I do so with reference to a single end, that of learning and understanding the law."^[33]: 457 Holmes's insistence on the material basis of law, on the facts of a case, has led some to characterize him as unfeeling, however. George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen summarized Holmes's views this way: "Holmes was a cold and brutally cynical man who had contempt for the masses and for the progressive laws he voted to uphold ... an aristocratic nihilist who once told his sister that he loathed 'the thick-fingered clowns we call the people'."^[65]

Reputation as a dissenter

Although Holmes did not dissent frequently—during his 29 years on the U.S. Supreme Court, he wrote only 72 separate opinions, whereas he penned 852 majority opinions—his dissents were often prescient and acquired so much authority that he became known as "The Great Dissenter". Chief Justice Taft complained that "his opinions are short, and not very helpful".^[66] Two of his most famous dissents were in Abrams v. United States and Lochner v. New York.^[67]

Speeches

Only Holmes's legal writings were readily available during his life and in the first years after his death, but he confided his thoughts more freely in talks, often to limited audiences, and more than two thousand letters that have survived. Holmes's executor, John Gorham Palfrey, diligently collected Holmes's published and unpublished papers and donated them (and their copyrights) to Harvard Law School. Harvard Law Professor Mark De Wolfe Howe undertook to edit the papers and was authorized by the school to publish them and to prepare a biography of Holmes. Howe published several volumes of correspondence, beginning with Holmes's correspondence with Frederick Pollock,^[68][69] and a volume of Holmes's speeches,^[70] before his untimely death. Howe's work formed the basis of much subsequent Holmes scholarship.^{[citation needed]}

Holmes's speeches were divided into two groups: public addresses, which he gathered into a slim volume, regularly updated, that he gave to friends and used as a visiting card, and less formal addresses to men's clubs, dinners, law schools, and Twentieth Regiment reunions. All of the speeches are reproduced in the third volume of The Collected Works of Justice Holmes.^[71] The public addresses are Holmes's effort to express his personal philosophy in Emersonian, poetic terms. They frequently advert to the Civil War and to death, and express a hope that personal sacrifice, however pointless it may seem, serves to advance the human race toward some as-yet unforeseen goal. This mysterious purpose explained the commitment to duty and honor that Holmes felt deeply himself and that he thought was the birthright of a certain class of men. As Holmes stated at a talk upon receiving an honorary degree from Yale:

Why should you row a boat race? Why endure long months of pain in preparation for a fierce half-hour ... Does anyone ask the question? Is there anyone who would not go through all its costs, and more, for the moment when anguish breaks into triumph – or even for the glory of having nobly lost?^[72]: 473

In the 1890s, at a time when "scientific" anthropology that spoke of racial differences was in vogue, his observations took on a bleakly Darwinist cast:

I rejoice at every dangerous sport which I see pursued. The students at Heidelberg, with their sword-slashed faces, inspire me with sincere respect. I gaze with delight upon our polo-players. If once in a while in our rough riding a neck is broken, I regard it not as a waste, but as a price well paid for the breeding of a race fit for headship and command.^[73]

This talk was widely reprinted and admired at the time, and may have contributed to the popular name given by the press to the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry (the "Rough Riders") during the Spanish–American War.^{[citation needed]}

On May 30, 1895, Holmes gave the address at a Memorial Day function held by the Graduating Class of Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts. The speech, which came to be known as "The Soldier's Faith", expressed Holmes's view of the conflict between the high ideals that motivated his generation to fight in the Civil War and the reality of a soldier's experience and personal pledge to follow orders into battle.^[74] Holmes stated:

[T]here is one thing I do not doubt ... and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands ...^[73]

That the joy of life is living, is to put out all one's powers as far as they will go; that the measure of power is obstacles overcome; to ride boldly at what is in front of you, be it fence or enemy; to pray, not for comfort, but for combat; to keep the soldier's faith against the doubts of civil life, more besetting and harder to overcome than all the misgivings of the battle-field, and to remember that duty is not to be proved in the evil day, but then to be obeyed unquestioning ...^[73]

In the conclusion of the speech, Holmes said:

We have shared the incommunicable experience of war; we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top.^[73]

Theodore Roosevelt reportedly admired Holmes's "Soldier's Faith" speech, and it is believed to have contributed to his decision to nominate Holmes to the Supreme Court.^[75]

Letters

Many of Holmes's closest male friends were in England and he corresponded with them regularly and at length, speaking usually of his work. Letters to friends in England such as Harold Laski and Frederick Pollock contain frank discussion of his decisions and his fellow justices. In the United States, letters to friends Morris R. Cohen, Lewis Einstein, Felix Frankfurter, and Franklin Ford are similar, although the letters to Frankfurter are especially personal. Holmes's correspondence with women in Great Britain and the U.S. was at least as extensive, and in many ways more revealing, but these series of letters have not been published. An extensive selection of letters to Claire Castletown, in Ireland, are quoted in Honorable Justice: The Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes, by Sheldon Novick.^[76] These letters are closer to Holmes's conversation and cast light upon the style he adopted in judicial opinions, which were often designed to be read aloud.^{[citation needed]}

In a letter to a contemporary, Holmes made this comment on international comparisons: "Judge not a people by the ferocity of its men, but by the steadfastness of its women."^[77]