The Common Law

In 1880–81 Holmes was invited to lecture on the common law at the Lowell Institute in Boston, and from these addresses developed his book The Common Law (1881). Here the genius of Holmes was first clearly revealed and the consistent direction of his thought made evident. A fresh voice was speaking in his words:

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. In order to know what it is, we must know what it has been, and what it tends to become. We must alternately consult history and existing theories of legislation. But the most difficult labor will be to understand the combination of the two into new products at every stage. The substance of the law at any given time pretty nearly corresponds, so far as it goes, with what is then understood to be convenient; but its form and machinery, and the degree to which it is able to work out desired results, depend very much upon its past.

In January 1882 Holmes was made Weld Professor of Law, a chair established for him at Harvard Law School. In December of the same year he accepted appointment to the Supreme Judicial Court of the State of Massachusetts, knowing the judgeship was his destiny and the function through which he could most influence the development of law. He was to sit on that bench for 20 years, becoming its chief justice in 1899. In 1902 Pres. Theodore Roosevelt appointed him associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. He sat on that court to a more advanced age than did any other person, retiring on January 12, 1932, soon before his 91st birthday.

Fanny Holmes, devoted, witty, wise, tactful, and perceptive, died on April 30, 1929. Holmes wrote to his intimate friend, the English jurist Sir Frederick Pollock, “For sixty years she made life poetry for me and at 88 one must be ready for the end. I shall keep at work and interested while it lasts—though not caring very much for how long.” He died two days before his 94th birthday.

Justice of the Supreme Court

In that long span of years on the Supreme Court he became acknowledged as one of the most notable jurists of the age—in the opinion of many the foremost. Often he has been called The Great Dissenter because of the brilliance of his dissenting opinions, but the phrase gives a falsely negative emphasis, and his penetration and originality are seen as fully in the opinions in which he expressed or concurred in the majority view of the court as in those in which he was in dissent.

Holmes believed that the making of laws is the business of legislative bodies, not of courts, and that within constitutional bounds the people have a right to whatever laws they choose to make, good or bad, through their elected representatives. He stated the concept of “clear and present danger” as the only basis for curtailing freedom of speech, illustrating it with the homely example “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.”

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.” Again: “If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”

A man austerely dedicated to his work, he also enjoyed the earthy and the droll. He loved Rabelais. Sometimes in Washington he attended burlesque shows and was said to have remarked, “I thank God I am a man of low tastes.” The newly inaugurated Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt called upon the retired justice and found him reading Plato. “Why do you read Plato, Mr. Justice?” “To improve my mind, Mr. President,” replied the 92-year-old man.

Holmes won the love and admiration of generations of lawyers and judges in his long career. When he resigned from the Supreme Court, his “brethren,” as he always addressed his fellow justices, wrote him a letter signed by all, saying in part:

Your profound learning and philosophic outlook have found expression in opinions which have become classic, enriching the literature of the law as well as its substance.…While we are losing the privilege of daily companionship, the most precious memories of your unfailing kindliness and generous nature abide with us, and these memories will ever be one of the choicest traditions of the Court.