oliver wendell jr. holmes

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Definition of oliver wendell jr. holmes in English English dictionary

born March 8, 1841, Boston, Mass. died March 6, 1935, Washington, D.C. U.S. jurist, legal historian, and philosopher. He was the son of Oliver Wendell Holmes and Amelia Lee Jackson, daughter of a Massachusetts supreme court justice. As an officer in the American Civil War, he was seriously wounded three times. He practiced law in Boston from 1867, eventually serving as an associate justice (1882-99) and then chief justice (1899-1902) of the state supreme court. In The Common Law (1881), he advanced the notion of law as accumulated experience rather than science. Appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States by Pres. Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, Holmes advocated judicial restraint, maintaining that lawmaking was the business of legislative bodies rather than the courts. In Schenk v. U.S. (1919), he articulated the "clear and present danger" test for proposed restrictions on freedom of speech. Many of his vigorous and lucid opinions, including dissenting opinions (he was known as "The Great Dissenter"), became classic interpretations of the law, and he is regarded as one of the foremost jurists of the modern age. He served until 1932

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Oliver Wendell Holmes

born Aug. 29, 1809, Cambridge, Mass., U.S. died Oct. 7, 1894, Cambridge U.S. physician, poet, and humourist. He joined the Harvard faculty in 1847 and later became dean of its medical school. He won national acclaim with his poem "Old Ironsides" (1830). From 1857 he published his "Breakfast-Table" essays in The Atlantic Monthly, later republished in such collections as The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858) and The Professor of the Breakfast-Table (1860). Other works include the poem "The Chambered Nautilus" and the novel Elsie Venner (1861). Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., is his son

Hyphenation

Ol·i·ver Wen·dell jr. Holmes