From the Friday Vault: A Brief Profile of the Long Life of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

The first thing to note about Justice Holmes is his lengthy life span. His grandmother could tell him stories from personal memories of the Revolutionary War. The great Ralph Waldo Emerson had been a close family friend as well as something of an intellectual mentor—as a Harvard undergraduate, Holmes had written a paper attacking Plato’s idealist philosophy which Emerson critiqued. “When you strike at a king,” Emerson wrote, “you must kill him.”