Montesquieu by Oliver Wendell Holmes

Montesquieu by Oliver Wendell Holmes

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Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935) was an American jurist who served on the Supreme Court of the United States as an Associate Judge from 1902 to 1932. He is one of the most often referenced United States Supreme Court judges in history, known for his long service, concise and pithy opinions, and deference to the decisions of elected legislators, particularly for his clear and present danger majority judgment in the 1919 case of Schenck v. United States. He is one of the most powerful common law judges in the United States. Holmes retired from the Supreme Court at the age of 90, making him the court's oldest justice. He also served on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts as an Associate Judge and Chief Justice, as well as being the Weld Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he was an alumnus.

Holmes' experience fighting in the American Civil War profoundly informed his legal thought, which he summarized in his maxim: The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. Holmes advocated moral skepticism and attacked the notion of natural law, signaling a dramatic shift in American law. As he stated in one of his most well-known opinions, Abrams v. He saw the United States Constitution as an experiment, just as all life is an experiment, and argued that as a result, we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to suppress the expression of beliefs that we despise and think to be dangerous.

He backed initiatives for economic control and pushed for extensive First Amendment freedom of speech throughout his time on the Supreme Court, which he was appointed to by President Theodore Roosevelt. Notwithstanding his strong scepticism and disagreement with their politics, these ideas, as well as his unusual personality and writing style, made him a popular figure, particularly among American progressives. Much later American legal thinking was affected by his jurisprudence, including judicial consensus in support of New Deal regulatory law, pragmatism, critical legal studies, and law and economics.