ABSTRACT
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. joined the US Supreme Court in 1902, beginning a twenty-nine-year period of service that, arguably, was bested only by John Marshall in its impact on how judicial scholars conceive of the role of law in American life and study its creation by judges and justices. Holmes was the son of a Boston writer and physician, and his upbringing is best characterized as a mixture of Protestant austerity and family membership in the New England intellectual community. Holmes's stature on the Court as a prolific writer is eclipsed, however, by the weight of his substantive impact on the law. Furthermore, Holmes is regarded as a consummate legal realist; he viewed law as a product of the values and policy preferences of judges and justices, a view consistent with his categorical rejection of what would later be called mechanical jurisprudence.
