A thirst for Justice

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a great common lawyer, was an adornment to the American Supreme Court. His wisdom is still cited in common-law jurisdictions throughout the world. Any English lawyer who would prefer to exchange Holmes’s incisive rulings — which usually amount to common sense elevated to a Platonic idea — for some European mush based on supposed human rights, reveals himself as a legal numbskull who so hates his own country that he cannot bear its successes, not least of which is the principle of freedom under the rule of law.

Holmes’s long life was a chronicle of American evolution. He would have been entitled to call his memoirs ‘The history of the United States in my own times’. At the beginning of the Civil War he joined the Union army. Shortly afterwards, as a young officer, he was stationed on the northern bank of the Potomac helping to man the ramparts.