Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: In-Laws

“If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

1890s, The Path of the Law (1897)
Context: If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience.

Law

“When we study law we are not studying a mystery but a well-known profession.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

1890s, The Path of the Law (1897)
Context: When we study law we are not studying a mystery but a well-known profession. We are studying what we shall want in order to appear before judges, or to advise people in such a way as to keep them out of court. The reason why it is a profession, why people will pay lawyers to argue for them or to advise them, is that in societies like ours the command of the public force is intrusted to the judges in certain cases, and the whole power of the state will be put forth, if necessary, to carry out their judgments and decrees. People want to know under what circumstances and how far they will run the risk of coming against what is so much stronger than themselves, and hence it becomes a business to find out when this danger is to be feared. The object of our study, then, is prediction, the prediction of the incidence of the public force through the instrumentality of the courts.

Law , Study

“Every opinion tends to become a law.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

198 U.S. at 75.
1900s, Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905)

Law

“The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky, but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi sovereign that can be identified; although some decisions with which I have disagreed seem to me to have forgotten the fact.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Southern Pacific Company v. Jensen 244 U.S. 205, 222 (1917) (Holmes, J., dissenting; opinion published (21 May 1917).
1910s

Law , Decision

“Only the emergency that makes it immediately dangerous to leave the correction of evil counsels to time warrants making any exception to the sweeping command, "Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech."”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

250 U.S. at 630-31.
1910s, Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919)

Law , Freedom , Evil , Time

“The liberty of the citizen to do as he likes so long as he does not interfere with the liberty of others to do the same, which has been a shibboleth for some well known writers, is interfered with by school laws, by the Post Office, by every state or municipal institution which takes his money for purposes thought desirable, whether he likes it or not.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

198 U.S. at 79.
1900s, Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905)

Money , School , Law

“Courts are apt to err by sticking too closely to the words of a law where those words import a policy that goes beyond them.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 469 (1928) (Holmes, J., dissenting).
1920s

Law

“Whatever disagreement there may be as to the scope of the phrase "due process of law" there can be no doubt that it embraces the fundamental conception of a fair trial, with opportunity to be heard.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Frank v. Magnum, 237 U.S. 309, 347 (1915).
1910s

Law

“I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

250 U.S. at 630.
1910s, Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919)

Death , Law , Thinking , Country

“Great cases like hard cases make bad law. For great cases are called great, not by reason of their importance in shaping the law of the future, but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgement.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Northern Securities Co. v. United States, 193 U.S. 197, 400-401 (1904).
1900s

Law , Feeling , Future

“I confess that I do not understand the principle on which the power to fix a minimum for the wages of women can be denied by those who admit the power to fix a maximum for their hours of work. I fully assent to the proposition that here as elsewhere the distinctions of the law are distinctions of degree, but I perceive no difference in the kind or degree of interference with liberty, the only matter with which we have any concern, between the one case and the other. The bargain is equally affected whichever half you regulate…. It will need more than the Nineteenth Amendment to convince me that there are no differences between men and women, or that legislation cannot take those differences into account.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., dissenting, Adkins, et al., Constituting the Minimum Wage Board of the District of Columbia, v. Children's Hospital of the District of Columbia; Same v. Lyons, 261 U.S. 569–70 (1923).
1920s

Women , Men , Law , Understanding

“Now and then, an extraordinary case may turn up, but constitutional law, like other mortal contrivances, has to take some chances, and in the great majority of instances, no doubt, justice will be done.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Blinn v. Nelson, 222 U.S. 1, 7 (1911).
1910s

Justice , Law , Chance

“For the rational study of the law the blackletter man may be the man of the present, but the man of the future is the man of statistics and the master of economics.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

1890s, The Path of the Law (1897)

Law , Study , Future

“The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience… 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.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. book The Common Law

The Common Law (1881), p. 1.
1880s

Life , Books , Law , Mathematics

“The aim of the law is not to punish sins, but is to prevent certain external results.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Commonwealth v. Kennedy, 170 Mass. 18, 20 (1897) (opinion of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts).
1890s

Law

“I do not think the United States would come to an end if we lost our power to declare an Act of Congress void. I do think the Union would be imperiled if we could not make that declaration as to the laws of the several States.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

1910s, "Law and the Court" (1913)

Law , Thinking

“Philosophy may have gained by the attempts in recent years to look through the fiction to the fact and to generalize corporations, partnerships, and other groups into a single conception. But to generalize is to omit, and, in this instance, to omit one characteristic of the complete corporation, as called into being under modern statutes, that is most important in business and law.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Donnell v. Herring-Hall-Marvin Safe Co., 208 U.S. 267, 273 (1908).
1900s

Law , Business , Partnership

“The law, so far as it depends on learning, is indeed, as it has been called, the government of the living by the dead. To a very considerable extent no doubt it is inevitable that the living should be so governed. The past gives us our vocabulary and fixes the limits of our imagination; we cannot get away from it. There is, too, a peculiar logical pleasure in making manifest the continuity between what we are doing and what has been done before. But the present has a right to govern itself so far as it can; and it ought always to be remembered that historic continuity with the past is not a duty, it is only a necessity.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

"Learning and Science", speech at a dinner of the Harvard Law School Association in honor of Professor C. C. Langdell (June 25, 1895); reported in Speeches by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1896). p. 67-68.
1890s

Pleasure , Law , Imagination , Learning

“When twenty years ago a vague terror went over the earth and the word socialism began to be heard, I thought and still think that fear was translated into doctrines that had no proper place in the Constitution or the common law. Judges are apt to be naif, simple-minded men, and they need something of Mephistopheles. We too need education in the obvious—to learn to transcend our own convictions and to leave room for much that we hold dear to be done away with short of revolution by the orderly change of law.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

1910s, "Law and the Court" (1913)

Men , Education , Fear , Law