At
age twenty, the Harvard-educated son of one of the nation’s most famous
volunteered for military service. He survived such battles as Ball’s Bluff,
Antietam and Fredericksburg, and then hung out his shingle as an attorney.
Appointed to the Massachusetts Supreme Court after fifteen years of practice,
he was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1902. There Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Jr., won such renown for his minority decisions that his book about his
dissenting opinions, Collected Legal Papers, was widely read by members of the
general public as well as by attorneys.
