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© 2005 Burton Randall Hanson
            Since 2005
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BurtLaw's Justice Holmes

Justice Holmes Links:

-- The Path of the Law, text of Justice Holmes' greatest essay, originally printed at 10 Harvard Law Review 457 (1897), reprinted here by Project Gutenberg.


-- BurtLaw on Mandatory Retirement of Judges, an essay written in 2000 by Burton Randall Hanson that draws in part on Justice Holmes' example in arguing against mandatory retirement of judges.

-- Speech delivered on Memorial Day, May 30, 1884, at Keene, N.H., before John Sedgwick Post No. 4, Grand Army of the Republic ("In our youth our hearts were touched with fire").

-- Speech delivered on Memorial Day, May 30, 1895, at a Meeting Called by the Graduating Class of Harvard University ("The Soldier's Faith").

-- Michael H. Hoffheimer, Justice Holmes: Law and the Search for Control, Supreme Court Historical Society 1989 Yearbook ("reconsider[ation of] the dynamics of Holmes' intellectual development from a psychoanalytic perspective") ("The relationships [with younger intellectual sparring partners] demonstrate the extraordinary plasticity of Holmes' super-ego, and the lengths to which he would go to cultivate polite pugilism").

-- Milton Handler and Michael Ruby, Justice Holmes and the Year Books, Supreme Court Historical Society 1988 Yearbook:

When the Court was back in session, Stone returned to his chambers one day after hearing arguments and recounted a brief conversation that he had had with Justice Holmes. "Why did you use the Beale translation in the footnote to the Hudson opinion?" Holmes had asked Stone. "Surely, we can translate the Year Books ourselves." "Perhaps you can, but you must exclude me and my law clerk," Stone responded. "I'll translate it then," Holmes said. Stone directed me to provide Holmes with the Year Book in question. That's where the fun began....

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894), a biographical sketch of Justice Holmes' father by Horace E. Scudder, from the Riverside Edition of The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes xi-xxi (1895), reprinted here by Eldritch Press..

Quotes:
-- "[The] law, wherein, as in a magic mirror, we see reflected, not only our own lives, but the lives of all men that have been! When I think on this magic theme, my eyes dazzle." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., "The Law" (1913) in The Occasional Speeches of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes 20, 21 (Mark DeWolfe Howe ed., 1962).

Justice Holmes' Memorial Day speeches. In Minnesota our peripatetic justices of the supreme court self-admittedly make "hundreds" of "public appearances" around the state each year. Most of these appearances do not involve the giving of "speeches." That's probably a good thing, because, in my opinion, few judges these days are capable of giving a speech that anyone will remember longer than five minutes. The great Justice Holmes probably would have laughed at the thought of a judge making a "public appearance." But he did occasionally give a speech. He gave around 45 of them in his 50 years of combined service on the benches in Massachusetts and then, starting at age 60, in Washington, D.C. They are collected in a wonderful slim little volume that I own. Many of them are just a few lines long. They are almost all memorable.  Holmes gave two great Memorial Day speeches. The first, containing the famous line "In our youth our hearts were touched with fire," was delivered on Memorial Day, May 30, 1884, at Keene, NH. Excerpt:

"Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference, and do not pretend to undervalue the worldly rewards of ambition, we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after us. But, above all, we have learned that whether a man accepts from Fortune her spade, and will look downward and dig, or from Aspiration her axe and cord, and will scale the ice, the one and only success which it is his to command is to bring to his work a mighty heart  Such hearts--ah me, how many!--were stilled twenty years ago; and to us who remain behind is left this day of memories. Every year--in the full tide of spring, at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life--there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death. Year after year lovers wandering under the apple trees and through the clover and deep grass are surprised with sudden tears as they see black veiled figures stealing through the morning to a soldier's grave...." More

The second, the "Soldier's Faith" speech, was delivered on May 30, 1895, at a gathering of the graduating class of Harvard University. "President Theodore Roosevelt's admiration for this speech was a factor in Holmes' nomination to the US Supreme Court." More

Holmes' father's hunt for the captain. "In the dead of the night which closed upon the bloody field of Antietam, my household was startled from its slumbers by the loud summons of a telegraphic messenger.  The air had been heavy all day with rumors of battle, and thousands and tens of thousands had walked the streets with throbbing hearts, in dread anticipation of the tidings any hour might bring...." This is from a famous piece -- My Hunt After "The Captain" -- that Holmes' father, the world-renowned doctor and writer, wrote about his search for his battle-wounded son. It was later collected in a terrific volume of his miscellaneous writings titled Pages from an Old Volume of Life. Eventually, he found him:
In the first car, on the fourth seat to the right, I saw my Captain; there saw I him, even my first-born, whom I had sought through any cities. "How are you, Boy?" "How are you, Dad?" Such are the proprieties of life, as they are observed among us Anglo-Saxons of the nineteenth century, decently disguising those natural impulses that made Joseph, the Prime Minister of Egypt, weep aloud so that the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard, nay, which had once overcome his shaggy old uncle Esau so entirely that he fell on his brother's neck and cried like a baby in the presence of all the women. But the hidden cisterns of the soul may be filling fast with sweet ears, while the windows through which it looks are undimmed by a drop or a film of moisture....

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