Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 8, 1841. At age sixteen, Holmes began attending Harvard University. He wrote articles for student publications and complained of the school's unwillingness to accept new ideas. One such idea was the theory of evolution, first published in 1859 by English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882). Holmes was fascinated by the scientific reasoning Darwin used to arrive at his idea that humans and other animals had evolved from earlier forms of life.

Holmes served in the Civil War (1861-65) for three years before enrolling at Harvard Law School in 1864. In 1866, he began his career as a lawyer and also wrote and taught law. In 1881, Holmes published The Common Law, in which he argued that laws should not be unchanging rules that are simply passed on from generation to generation, but should change and develop through the...