Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (Born March 8, 1841 in Boston , Massachusetts , † March 6, 1935 in Washington, DC ) was an American legal scholar . From 1902 to 1932 he was judge at the Supreme Court of the United States . Due to his long term of office, his short and concise style of argument and his outspoken conviction that as a representative of the judiciary , he must respect the decisions of the democratically elected parliament , he became one of the most frequently cited judges of this court. As a legal theorist , he advocated a view that is close to legal realism , according to which the task of jurisprudence is limited to successfully predicting the actual decisions of the courts: “The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law. "
Life
Childhood and youth, experiences in the civil war
Holmes was the son of noted writer and doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes and the abolitionist Amelia Lee Jackson. Holmes was interested in literature from an early age, and the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson in particular were to have a decisive influence on his thinking. He also joined the abolitionist movement that flourished in Boston during the 1850s. His student best friend, the Quaker Norwood Penrose Halliwell, recruited him into the life guard of the radical abolitionist activist Wendell Phillips in 1861 , and when the Civil War broke out in April of that year , Homes and Halliwell stayed illegally absent from lectures and volunteered for the front line and thus jeopardized their entitlement to a university degree. However, since the Holmes Regiment was not immediately sent south and the President of the university had obtained an amnesty for the absentee at the instigation of Wendell's father, Holmes received his degree on June 17 of that year, four days later he entered service in the 20th Volunteer Regiment of the state of Massachusetts.
From 1861 to 1864 Holmes took part in the American Civil War as an officer and was wounded several times. An anecdote that was often circulated later says that Holmes shouted "Get down, you fool" to US President Abraham Lincoln during the Battle of Fort Stevens in July 1864 when he did not seek cover in time. The war experiences shaped Holmes' basic state theoretical conviction of the primacy of violence: both state authority and the laws it enacted were originally based on violence. From this basic conviction, Holmes later developed his positivistic legal theory , which made him reject the existence of a pre-state natural law and any form of legal romanticism .
Legal career leading to appointment as Justice to the United States Supreme Court
After the war he first settled in Boston as a lawyer . He married Fanny Dixwell, a childhood friend. The marriage lasted until his wife's death in 1929. The marriage had no biological children, but the Holmes couple adopted the orphan Dorothy Upham.
Holmes spent several spring and summer in London . Here he built up a close circle of friends and became one of the founders of the "sociological law school" of Great Britain that was later to be called . A generation later, American legal realism developed from this .
In 1870, Holmes became the editor of the American Law Review . He edited a new edition of the Commetaries on American Law by the American lawyer James Kents and published several articles that dealt with common law . In 1881 the first edition of his best-known book The Common Law was published , which summarized the approaches he had developed on this topic in the years before. This work is considered to be the only significant work in American law whose author practiced as a lawyer. In this work, Holmes recognized the judicial judgment as the only source of law . In truth, the judicial judgment is based less on correct methodological conclusions and syllogism , but to a not inconsiderable extent on non-legal aspects such as the judge's moral convictions and personal prejudices. He called these "reasons for the decision" - as opposed to the official reasons for the decision - as the "unwritten premises" of the legal process. These views made Holmes a forerunner of American legal realism. In 1877 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .
In 1878, US President Rutherford B. proposed Hayes Holmes as federal judge, but was persuaded by a Massachusetts senator - George Frisbie Hoar - to nominate another candidate. In 1882 Holmes was first professor of law at Harvard and then judge at the Massachusetts Supreme Court . In 1889 he was appointed presiding judge of that court to succeed Walbridge A. Field .
During his time as a judge in Massachusetts, Holmes developed his views on common law and also applied these principles in practice by strictly adhering to the prejudices already issued on the legal matter in question . However, in cases dealing with workers' rights, he deviated from precedents by giving workers the right to peacefully form trade unions . It is both a requirement of fairness and an expression of the right to freedom of expression to allow workers to meet their employers on an equal footing.
Honors
In 1978 the United States Post Office issued a 15 cents postage stamp in his memory.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr .: The Path of the Law . In: 10 Harvard Law Review 457 (1897) . ( constitution.org ).
- ↑ Public papers of the Presidents of the United States , Richard Nixon, 1971. United States Government Printing Office 1972. p. 418
Works
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr .: The Common Law . New York 1991, ISBN 0-486-26746-6 . (first published: Boston 1881); German translation: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr .: Common law of England and North America: presented in eleven treatises . Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-428-12151-1 . (unchanged reprint of the 1st edition from 1912)
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr .: The essential Holmes: Selections from the Letters, Speeches, Judicial Opinions, And Other Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr . Chicago (et al.) 1992, ISBN 0-226-67552-1 .
literature
- Louis Menand : The Metaphysical Club . Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York 2001, ISBN 0-374-52849-7 .
- HL Pohlman: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Utilitarian Jurisprudence . Cambridge 1984, ISBN 0-674-49615-9 .
- HL Pohlman: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Free Speech and the Living Constitution . New York 1991, ISBN 0-8147-6614-5 .
- Steven J. Burton: The Path of the Law and its Influence: the Legacy of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Cambridge 2000.
- Stephen Budiansky: Oliver Wendell Holmes. A Life in War, Law, and Ideas , New York: WW Norton & Co. 2019, ISBN 978-0-393-63472-3 .
Movie
In 1950, John Sturges directed the biopic The Magnificent Yankee with Louis Calhern as Holmes.
Web links
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in the nndb (English)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Holmes, Oliver Wendell Jr. |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Holmes, Oliver Wendell Jr. |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American lawyer and judge |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 8, 1841 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Boston , Massachusetts |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 6, 1935 |
| Place of death | Washington, DC |