Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
From Conservapedia
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935) served on the United States Supreme Court for over 30 years and is an icon in American law schools. He is known for his elegant writing style and for dissenting from key decisions decades before the entire Court moved to his side of those issues. For example, Holmes dissented from Lochner doctrine as established Lochner v. New York (1905), in which the Supreme Court invalidated an economic regulation by the state of New York. Decades later the Supreme Court rightly came to agree with Holmes' side of the case.
But critics of Justice Holmes observe that although he was highly moral in his youth, fighting against slavery in the Civil War, he became increasingly amoral and utilitarian as a justice. They criticize Justice Holmes when he upheld the forced sterilization of a young woman on the grounds that she had a low IQ. "Three generations of imbeciles are enough," Justice Holmes' bellowed in his harshly utilitarian style in Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927). Holmes was a believer in Darwinism and sought to apply it to the law and to life, as urged by social Darwinism.
After editing the American Law Review early in his career, he wrote The Common-Law in 1881. The following year he became a professor of law at Harvard, and two decades later he was appointed to the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 1899. In 1902 President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him to the United States Supreme Court in 1902, where he served until the age of 90, when his colleagues suggested his resignation. He died a few years later.
Holmes's utilitarian judicial philosophy is best summed by his famous quote that "The life of the law has not been logic, but experience." His own migration away from the uninformed Christianity of his youth can be seen in his advice as an old man to the younger generation: "Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered that I was not God." However such a statement may merely have been made to clarify a long running rumor of Holmes's omnipotence.
Although Justice Holmes retains an almost saint-like reverence in American law schools, there are actually few judges or law professors who follow his legal philosophy today. An example of a utilitarian judge today would be Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, who wrote a book in tribute of Justice Holmes.
Specific Views
Justice Holmes was fond of saying that insofar as government is the prerequisite for the fruits of civilization for which we pay taxes. See, e.g., Compania de Tabacos v. Collector, 275 U.S. 87, 100 (1927) (Holmes, J., dissenting).
Justice Holmes wrote the 5-4 decision upholding rent control and denying a claim for repossession by a property owner. Block v. Hirsh, 256 U.S. 135 (1921). Justice Holmes made no mention of the Fifth Amendment protection of private property in his opinion.
