BIOGRAPHY AND PERSONALITY OF A FAMOUS PISCES: OLIVER W. HOLMES

(born March 8, 1841, Boston, Mass.—died March 6, 1935, Washington, D.C.) U.S. jurist, legal historian, and philosopher. He was the son of Oliver Wendell Holmes and Amelia Lee Jackson, daughter of a Massachusetts supreme court justice. As an officer in the American Civil War, he was seriously wounded three times. He practiced law in Boston from 1867, eventually serving as an associate justice (1882–99) and then chief justice (1899–1902) of the state supreme court. In The Common Law (1881), he advanced the notion of law as accumulated experience rather than science. Appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States by Pres. Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, Holmes advocated judicial restraint, maintaining that lawmaking was the business of legislative bodies rather than the courts. In Schenk v. U.S. (1919), he articulated the “clear and present danger” test for proposed restrictions on freedom of speech. Many of his vigorous and lucid opinions, including dissenting opinions (he was known as “The Great Dissenter”), became classic interpretations of the law, and he is regarded as one of the foremost jurists of the modern age. He served until 1932.

Copyright © 1994-2008 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.