Mr. Justice Holmes: A Reappraisal

Abstract

If American law were to be represented by a single figure, said Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1901, "skeptic and worshipper alike would agree without dispute that the figure could be one alone, and that one John Marshall." ... But half a century later it would be rather Holmes himself upon whose pre-eminence skeptic and worshipper alike would agree. Nor would the acknowledgment of pre-eminence be limited to the juristic field alone. Holmes was indubitably the greatest jurist that the English speaking world produced in two generations, but he was, for all his dedication to the law, more than a jurist, and his greatness in the law was a product of greatness of mind and of spirit that encompassed more than law. "The law is not the place for the artist or the poet," he once said, yet he himself was artist and poet as well as jurist and philosopher. That his was the most distinguished mind of its time was acknowledged, and to a mind flexible, sophisticated, and spacious, Holmes joined a character humane, affluent, and magnanimous. If a civilization may be judged by its best rather than by its average, the career and character of Holmes suggest that American civilization had in two centuries achieved a maturity and distinction which few nations of the Old World could match.¹