FAMOUS JURIST DEAD

Taranaki Daily News, 8 March 1935, Page 7

FAMOUS JURIST DEAD

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

SON OF FAMOUS AUTHOR-COLONEL

By Telegraph—Press Assn.—Copyright.

Washington, March 6.

The death has occurred of Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, former associate justice of the Supreme Court. On Friday he would have been 94. He was lieutenantcolonel in the civil war, and one of America’s most famous jurists of recent generations.

The late Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes was the son of the famous essayist and poet of that name. He was born in Boston on March 8, 1841. He had just graduated at Harvard when the Civil War broke out and he served for three years in the- Massachusetts Volunteers, rising to the rank of lieutenant-colonel and being twice wounded. In 1864 he began to study law at Harvard, obtaining his degree in 1866 and being called to the Bar in the following year. After practising in Boston, Mr. Holmes was appointed lecturer in constitutional law at Harvard in 1870, when he also became editor of the American Law Review. In 1871-72 he was university lecturer in jurisprudence, but in 1873 he became a partner in the firm of Shattuck, Holmes and Munroe and devoted himself to legal practice. His academic career, however, was not over. He was appointed lecturer in common law at the Lowell Institute in 1880 and two years later became a professor in the Harvard Law School. He resigned the chair before the end of the year, having been given the post of Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Mr. Holmes did not retire from the Bench until he was nearly 91. He was not only a great judge—the greatest, according to Lord Morley, in the Englishspeaking world—but his judgments were noted for their literary style and wealth of epigrams, as was his book, “The Common Law” (1881). This work gave a conspectus of the subject, and this was done with a wealth of illustration and a clarity of reasoning which, quite apart from the legal knowledge displayed, gave the author an international reputation. He also edited the 12th edition of “Kent’s Commentaries,” since regarded as the standard edition, and in 1913 and 1920 published collections of speeches and legal papers. The aged jurist in 1924 was awarded the Roosevelt Medal for the development of public law. He has been described as the “American Balfour,” for his aristocratic bearing and wide knowledge recalled the famous Englishman. Lord Haldane considered him one of the three best talkers he had ever known.