SOURCE: "The American as Skeptic: Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935)," in The Genius of America: Men Whose Ideas Shaped Our Civilization, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1960, pp. 249-70.

In the following essay, Padover discusses Holmes's role on the Supreme Court as a pragmatic dissenter.

When twentieth-century Americans speak of judges, they are likely to think first of Oliver Wendell Holmes. He had the superb qualities that symbolize greatness in a jurist—striving for truth, tolerance of ideas, skepticism in the face of dogma, urbanity of manner, grace of expression, philosophic balance and, in the words of Judge Learned Hand, "above all, humility before the vast unknown." There has never been another American judge quite like Holmes, the Boston Brahmin who graced the United States Supreme Court for nearly a third of this century. His impact on America, particularly in the crucial area of judicial thought and posture, has been pervasive...