Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was the son of the famous Boston doctor and poet of the same name. He left Harvard to fight in the Civil War and was seriously wounded three times, at Ball's Bluff, Antietam and Chancellorsville. After the war he studied law, practiced in Boston, and in 1881 published The Common Law, which opens by saying that the life of the law has not been logic but experience. He served on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court for twenty years and in 1902 Theodore Roosevelt appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he served until he was ninety. Holmes argued that courts should usually defer to legislatures, and in Lochner v. New York in 1905 he dissented from striking down a law limiting bakers' hours. In Schenck v. United States in 1919 he wrote that speech could be punished only when it posed a clear and present danger, and later that year, dissenting in Abrams, he defended the free trade in ideas. In Buck v. Bell in 1927 he wrote the opinion upholding a state law on compulsory sterilization. He died in 1935.

Faith: Faith not well documented; his ancestors were Puritans, and as a judge he rejected natural-law theories. Source: Wikipedia