[2] During his tenure on the U.S. Supreme Court, to which he was appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, he supported the constitutionality of state economic regulation and came to advocate broad freedom of speech under the First Amendment, after, in Schenck v. United States (1919), having upheld for a unanimous court criminal sanctions against draft protestors with the memorable maxim that "free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic" and formulating the groundbreaking "clear and present danger" test.

[3] Later that same year, in his famous dissent in Abrams v. United States (1919), he wrote that "the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market ... That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution.

He joined a small firm, and in 1872 married a childhood friend, Fanny Bowditch Dixwell, buying a farm in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, the following year.

She could also be quiet and unassuming.... She was essentially a shy and private woman [and] stand-offish.... As she grew older, her inclination to solitude became more pronounced, and in time she became a virtual recluse...".

[22] Whenever he could, Holmes visited London during the social season of spring and summer, and during his years as a lawyer and judge in Boston he formed romantic friendships with English women of the nobility, with whom he corresponded while at home in the United States.

The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed.

A judge was obliged to choose between contending legal arguments, each posed in absolute terms, and the true basis of his decision was sometimes drawn from outside the law, when precedents were lacking or were evenly divided.

His resignation from his professorship, after only a few weeks and without notice, was resented by the law school faculty, with James Bradley Thayer finding Holmes's conduct "selfish" and "thoughtless".

While the courts must exercise a judgment of their own, it by no means is true that every law is void which may seem to the judges who pass upon it excessive, unsuited to its ostensible end, or based upon conceptions of morality with which they disagree.

If the state thinks that an admitted evil cannot be prevented except by prohibiting a calling or transaction not in itself necessarily objectionable, the courts cannot interfere, unless ... they can see that it 'is a clear, unmistakable infringement of rights secured by the fundamental law.

In Lochner, the Court struck down a New York statute that prohibited employees (spelled "employes" at the time) from being required or permitted to work in a bakery more than sixty hours a week.

In his brief dissent, Holmes said that the majority had reached its decision on the basis of the economic theory of laissez faire, but that the Constitution does not prevent the states from interfering with the liberty to contract.

Apparently learning that he was likely to publish this dissent, the government (perhaps alerted by Justice Louis D. Brandeis, newly appointed by President Woodrow Wilson) abandoned the case, and it was dismissed by the Court.

The chief justice then asked Holmes to write opinions that could be unanimous, upholding convictions in three similar cases, where there were jury findings that speeches or leaflets were published with an intent to obstruct the draft, a crime under the 1917 law.

The defendants in this case were socialists and anarchists, recent immigrants from Russia who opposed the apparent efforts of the United States to intervene in the Russian Civil War.

[43] Holmes condemned the Wilson Administration's prosecution and its insistence on draconian sentences for the defendants in passionate language: "Even if I am technically wrong [regarding the defendants' intent] and enough can be squeezed from these poor and puny anonymities to turn the color of legal litmus paper ... the most nominal punishment seems to me all that possibly could be inflicted, unless the defendants are to be made to suffer, not for what the indictment alleges, but for the creed that they avow ..." Holmes then went on to explain the importance of freedom of thought in a democracy: [W]hen men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe ... that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.

[50][51] The argument made on her behalf was principally that the statute requiring sterilization of institutionalized persons was unconstitutional, violating what today is called "substantive due process".

For instance, in 2001, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit cited Buck v. Bell to protect the constitutional rights of a woman coerced into sterilization without procedural due process.

[54] Buck v. Bell was also cited briefly, though not discussed, in Roe v. Wade, in support of the proposition that the Court does not recognize an "unlimited right to do with one's body as one pleases".

[6] His philosophy represented a departure from the prevailing jurisprudence of the time: legal formalism, which held that law was an orderly system of rules from which decisions in particular cases could be deduced.

In the modern world, the advances made in biology and the social sciences should allow a better conscious determination of the results of individual acts and the proper measure of liability for them.

Harvard Law Professor Mark De Wolfe Howe undertook to edit the papers and was authorized by the school to publish them and to prepare a biography of Holmes.

They frequently advert to the Civil War and to death, and express a hope that personal sacrifice, however pointless it may seem, serves to advance the human race toward some as-yet unforeseen goal.

[citation needed] On May 30, 1895, Holmes gave the address at a Memorial Day function held by the Graduating Class of Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts.

An extensive selection of letters to Claire Castletown, in Ireland, are quoted in Honorable Justice: The Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes, by Sheldon Novick.

[citation needed] In a letter to a contemporary, Holmes made this comment on international comparisons: "Judge not a people by the ferocity of its men, but by the steadfastness of its women.

After his death, his personal effects included his Civil War officer's uniform still stained with his blood and "torn with shot" as well as the Minié balls that had wounded him three times in separate battles.

Holmes's papers, donated to Harvard Law School, were kept closed for many years after his death, a circumstance that gave rise to somewhat fanciful accounts of his life.

The Harvard Law Library eventually relented and made available to scholars the extensive Holmes papers, collected and annotated by Mark DeWolfe Howe, who died before he was able to complete his own biography of the justice.

It will be found, most of all in the character of men.Second, on the sterilization laws enacted in Virginia and upheld by the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell: We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives.