Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was born on March 8, 1841. See ranking, bio blurb, and everyone else born that day.
About Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (March 8, 1841 – March 6, 1935) was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932. Holmes is one of the most widely cited and influential Supreme Court justices in American history, noted for his long tenure on the Court and for his pithy opinions – particularly those on civil liberties and American constitutional democracy – and deference to the decisions of elected legislatures. Holmes retired from the Court at the age of 90, an unbeaten record for oldest justice on the Supreme Court. He previously served the Union as a brevet colonel in the American Civil War (in which he was wounded three times), as an associate justice and chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and as Weld Professor of Law at his alma mater, Harvard Law School. His positions, distinctive personality, and writing style made him a popular figure, especially with American progressives. During his tenure on the U.S. Supreme Court, to which he was appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, he supported the constitutionality of state economic regulation and came to advocate broad freedom of speech under the First Amendment, after, in Schenck v. United States (1919), having upheld for a unanimous court criminal sanctions against draft protestors with the memorable maxim that "free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic" and formulating the groundbreaking "clear and present danger" test. Later that same year, in his famous dissent in Abrams v. United States (1919), he wrote that "the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market. ... That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment." He added that "we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death...." The University of Chicago Law Review has identified Holmes as the sixth-most-cited American legal scholar of all time. Holmes was a legal realist, as summed up in his maxim, "The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience". He was also a moral skeptic and an opponent of the doctrine of natural law. His jurisprudence and academic writing influenced much subsequent American legal thinking, including the judicial consensus upholding New Deal regulatory law, "sociological jurisprudence in the early twentieth century, and ... much of Legal Realism a generation later". His opinion on the landmark case Buck v. Bell (1927) was cited at the Nuremberg Trials by the Nazis' lawyers: "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime ... society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.... Three generations of imbeciles are enough."