Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Life and ideas

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. fought and was wounded in the American Civil War, then became a lawyer, a professor, a judge of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and, from 1902 to 1932, a justice of the United States Supreme Court. In The Common Law (1881) he wrote that the life of the law has not been logic but experience, and in his speech The Path of the Law (1897) he urged lawyers to see law as the 'bad man' does: as a prediction of what courts will do, not as a set of moral rules. Judges, he said, make law and should be open about the policy that guides them. On the Court he wrote short, forceful opinions, including dissents on free speech that later became law. He is called the father of American legal realism.